Optimization of Element Positions for direction Finding with Sparse Arrays

Sparse arrays are attractive for direction-Of-Arrival (DOA) estimation since they can provideaccurate estimates at a low cost. A problem of great interest in this matter is to determinethe element positions that yield the best DOA estimation performance. A major difficulty with this problem is to define a suitable performance measure to optimize. In this paper, a novel criterion is proposed for optimizing element positions. The ambiguity threshold of the Weiss-Weinstein Bound (WWB) is used to optimize the element positionsof a sparse linear array. The array obtainedfrom the optimization is compared withsome other sparse arraystructuresthat have been proposed in the literature.