Direction-of-Arrival Estimation for Circulating Space-Time Coding Arrays: From Beamspace MUSIC to Spatial Smoothing in the Transform Domain

As a special type of coherent collocated Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) radar, a circulating space-time coding array (CSTCA) transmits an identical waveform with a tiny time shift. It provides a simple way to achieve a full angular coverage with a stable gain and a low sidelobe level (SLL) in the range domain. In this paper, we address the problem of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation in CSTCA. Firstly, we design a novel two-dimensional space-time matched filter on receiver. It jointly performs equivalent transmit beamforming in the angle domain and waveform matching in the fast time domain. Multi-beams can be formed to acquire controllable transmit freedoms. Then, we propose a beamspace multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm applicable in case of small training samples. Next, since targets at the same range cell show characteristics of coherence, we devise a transformation matrix to restore the rotational invariance property (RIP) of the receive array. Afterwards, we perform spatial smoothing in element domain based on the transformation. In addition, the closed-form expression of Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for angle estimation is derived. Theoretical performance analysis and numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed approaches.