Abstract:

Due to the polarization diversity of conformal array manifold, the coupling between polarization parameters and bearings of source is the distinct difficulty in direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of conformal array antennas. In view of the characteristic of cylindrical conformal array antennas, an array manifold model for cylindrical conformal array is established. With the help of welldesigned configuration of elements on cylindrical carriers and estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance techniques (ESPRIT) algorithm, the decoupling method for DOA and polarization parameters is implemented. The parameters pairing method of  ESPRIT is given when DOA of multiple sources is estimated. On this basis, a blind DOA estimation algorithm for cylindrical conformal array antenna with respect to polarization diversity is proposed. Monte Carlo simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.