Joint Phased-MIMO and Nested-Array Beamforming for Increased Degrees-of-Freedom

Abstract EN

Phased-multiple-input multiple-output (phased-MIMO) enjoys the advantages of MIMO virtual array and phased-array directional gain, but it gets the directional gain at a cost of reduced degrees-of-freedom (DOFs).

To compensate the DOF loss, this paper proposes a joint phased-array and nested-array beamforming based on the difference coarray processing and spatial smoothing.

The essence is to use a nested-array in the receiver and then fully exploit the second order statistic of the received data.

In doing so, the array system offers more DOFs which means more sources can be resolved.

The direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation performance of the proposed method is evaluated by examining the root-mean-square error.

Simulation results show the proposed method has significant superiorities to the existing phased-MIMO.