DOA Estimation for Noncircular Sources with Multiple Noncoherent Subarrays

This letter addresses the direction-of-arrival estimation issue for noncircular sources with multiple noncoherent subarrays. First, we present the Cramer-Rao lower bound for this problem. Then, for multiple noncoherent subarrays, we propose the asymptotically minimum variance second-order estimators for the two cases of circular and noncircular sources, respectively. Furthermore, we propose a computationally efficient MUSIC-like algorithm for such arrays which can exploit the noncircularity of the sources. Finally, numerical examples have been provided to demonstrate the performance of the new methods.