Nested Array Sensor With Grating Lobe Suppression and Arbitrary Transmit–Receive Beampattern Synthesis

Sparse arrays have potential advantages over their regularly spaced counterparts, but they will generate undesired grating lobes. This paper investigates a sparse linear phased-array for grating lobe suppression and arbitrary transmit-receive beampattern synthesis. To achieve these aims, a modified twolevel nested-array is developed, which provides increased degrees-of-freedom than a standard uniform linear array with the same number of elements via the difference co-array processing algorithm in the receiver. A least squares and iterative algorithm is also devised for linear array arbitrary transmit-receive beampattern design with minimum number of antenna elements. Moreover, the nested-array design is exploited for minimum variance distortionless response adaptive beamforming and direction finding. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified through extensive numerical results.