A new direction-of-arrival estimation and calibration method for arrays composed of multiple identical subarrays

In this paper, a novel direction-of-arrival (DOA) method for partly-calibrated arrays composed of multiple identical subarrays is proposed. The new approach enables us not only to estimate the DOAs in this type of arrays but also, to simultaneously, compute the steering vectors of all subarrays. Unlike other methods for partly-calibrated arrays, our proposed algorithm exploits the estimated calibration information and the structure of the steering vector to estimate the DOAs. Simulation results show that the proposed method exhibits superior estimation performance, both in threshold domain and asymptotically as compared to existing methods.