FFT-Based DOA Estimation for Coprime MIMO Radar: A Hardware-Friendly Approach

In this paper, we present a fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation algorithm for coprime multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar, where both the performance and the system overhead are well balanced. The coprime arrays are deployed in the framework of MIMO radar for sparse sensing, where an augmented virtual array can be generated from the difference coarray of sum coarray (DCSC) perspective. By implementing FFT on the second-order DCSC signals, it is shown that the DOAs can be retrieved from the resulting spatial response with an improved resolution. Moreover, neither the complex matrix operations nor the optimization problems are involved, indicating the efficient and hardware-friendly characteristic. Simulation results demonstrate the performance superiorities of the proposed algorithm.