A Novel Sparse Framework for Angle and Frequency Estimation

The topic of joint angle and frequency estimation (JAFE) has aroused extensive interests in the past decades. Current estimation algorithms mainly rely on the Nyquist sampling criterion. In order not to cause ambiguity for parameter estimation, the space–time intervals must be smaller than given thresholds, which results in complicated hardware costs and a huge computational burden. This paper aims to reduce the complexity for JAFE, and a novel sparsity-aware framework is proposed. Unlike the current uniform sampling architectures, the incoming narrow-band singles are sampled by a series of space–time coprime samplers. An improved rotational invariance estimator is introduced, which offers closed-form solutions for both angle and frequency estimation. The mathematical treatments indicate that our methodology is inherent in larger spatial/temporal aperture than the uniform sampling architectures; hence, it provides more accurate JAFE compared to alternative approaches relying on uniform sampling. Additionally, it attains nearly the same complexity as the current rotational invariance approach. Numerical results agree with the theoretical advantages of our methodology.