Direction of Arrival Estimation of Generalized Nested Array via Difference–Sum Co-Array

To address the weakness that the difference co-array (DCA) only enhances the degrees of freedom (DOFs) to a limited extent, a new configuration called the generalized nested array via difference–sum co-array (GNA-DSCA) is proposed for direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. We consider both the temporal and spatial information of the array output to construct the DSCA model, based on which the DCA and sum co-array (SCA) of the GNA are systematically analyzed. The closed-form expression of the DOFs for the GNA-DSCA is derived under the determined dilation factors. The optimal results show that the GNA-DSCA has a more flexible configuration and more DOFs than the GNA-DCA. Moreover, the larger dilation factors yield significantly wider virtual aperture, which indicates that it is more attractive than the reported DSCA-based sparse arrays. Finally, a hole-filling strategy based on atomic norm minimization (ANM) is utilized to overcome the degradation of the estimation performance due to the non-uniform virtual array, thus achieving accurate DOA estimation. The simulation results verify the superiority of the proposed configuration in terms of virtual array properties and estimation performance.