Interleaved Arrays with Second-Order Difference Coarray Generation for Mutual Coupling Reduction

Nonuniform linear arrays (NLAs) have attracted considerable attention owing to their capability to enhance the degrees of freedom (DOF) and increase the array aperture, which is essential for improving performance in terms of both the direction of arrival estimation and adaptive beamforming. This paper presents two new NLAs, namely interleaved coprime array (ICA) and augmented interleaved array (AIA). The ICA consists of two uniform linear subarrays, whose inter-element spacings are coprime integers. The ICA can obtain more uniform degrees of freedom (uDOF), while maintaining weak mutual coupling effects, because its configuration includes only minority sensors interleaved. The optimal configuration of the ICA is deduced using the principle of maximizing the uDOF. Moreover, the AIA geometry is obtained by removing a redundant element in the ICA and appropriately designing the location of the additional element. For a fixed total number of sensors, the AIA can gain more uDOF and DOF than the ICA, while exhibiting lower mutual coupling effects. The closed-form expressions for the properties of the proposed array structures involving an arbitrary number of sensors are also derived. Numerical simulations are performed to verify the superiority of the proposed arrays over other sparse arrays.