Generalized parallel coprime array for two-dimensional DOA estimation: A perspective from maximizing degree of freedom

Parallel arrays with coprime subarrays have shown its potential advantages for two dimensional direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. In this paper, by introducing two flexible coprime factors to enlarge the inter-element spacing of parallel uniform subarrays, we propose a generalized parallel coprime array (GPCA) geometry. The proposed geometry enjoys flexible array layouts by the coprime factors and enables to extend the array aperture to achieve great improvement of estimation performance. Meanwhile, we verify that GPCA always can obtain M
²
degrees of freedom (DOFs) in co-array domain via 2M sensors after optimization, which outperforms sparse parallel array geometries, such as parallel coprime array (PCA) and parallel augmented coprime array (PACA), and is the same as parallel nested array (PNA) with extended aperture. The superiority of GPCA geometry has been proved by numerical simulations with sparse representation methods.