Impact of Mutual Coupling on Performance of DoA Estimation using MUSIC

This paper investigates the impact of mutual coupling (MC) on the performance of direction of arrival (DoA) estimation based on multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm with uniform linear array (ULA). Among various schemes for compensating MC, two widely used ones are compared in the sense of root mean squire error (RMSE); The one is estimating the mutual coupling coefficients and the other is ignoring boundary antennas of ULA. It is shown that the former one is superior to the later in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes and/or a number of samples is small, but vice versa as SNR and/or the number of samples increase.