A Low-Complexity ESPRIT-Based DOA Estimation Method for Co-Prime Linear Arrays

The problem of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is investigated for co-prime array, where the co-prime array consists of two uniform sparse linear subarrays with extended inter-element spacing. For each sparse subarray, true DOAs are mapped into several equivalent angles impinging on the traditional uniform linear array with half-wavelength spacing. Then, by applying the estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance technique (ESPRIT), the equivalent DOAs are estimated, and the candidate DOAs are recovered according to the relationship among equivalent and true DOAs. Finally, the true DOAs are estimated by combining the results of the two subarrays. The proposed method achieves a better complexity–performance tradeoff as compared to other existing methods.