DOA Estimation Exploiting Moving Dilated Nested Arrays

A novel dilated nested array is presented to obtain an enhanced fully filled difference coarray exploiting array motions. The proposed sparse array is suitable for the cases when the sensing environment can be assumed stationary over an array motion of half wavelength or shorter. Closed-form expressions of the number of degrees of freedom in the difference coarray of the combined array before and after the translation motion are presented for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation. It is shown that the maximum number of consecutive lags for this case is three times that of the corresponding conventional two-level nested array. Numerical results of DOA estimation using the proposed array are provided for performance comparison and to validate array analyses.