Effective nested array design for fourth-order cumulant-based DOA estimation

In this paper, we propose a novel sparse array design for direction-of-arrival estimation based on the fourth-order statistics of the received signals. The utilization of fourth-order statistics provides a higher number of degrees of freedom and flexibility as compared to the commonly used covariance-based methods. The proposed sparse array design scheme yields the fourth-order difference co-array which offers a significant increment in the number of consecutive lags as compared to the existing sparse array structures used by fourth-order cumulant-based direction-of-arrival estimation methods. Moreover, the proposed array is designed in such a way that the resulting difference co-array does not contain any holes. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed array structure.