A Robust Direction of Arrival Estimation Method With High DOF Mirror Coprime Array in Impulsive Noise

Direction of arrival (DOA) plays an essential and significant role in wireless communication systems, which has been widely utilized in localization, intelligent navigation, and vehicle communications. Recently, with the exponential explosive growth of wireless communication devices, the electromagnetic environment has become more and more complicated. In such electromagnetic environment, it remains a challenge to achieve robust and accurate DOA estimation while maximizing source discrimination with limited physical sensors. Additionally, conventional DOA methods are usually based on Gaussian noise assumption, while these methods would suffer from performance degradation in impulsive noise. Aiming at addressing these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel accurate and robust DOA estimation method with high degree of freedom (DOF). In the proposed method, firstly, a novel coprime array structure, termed mirror coprime array (MCA), is proposed for DOA estimation. Relying on the properties of non-circular signals, the proposed MCA can make full use of the received signals from limited physical elements to accurately estimate more DOAs with high DOF. Next, a novel square-based correntropy operator (SCO) is defined to effectively suppress the impulsive noise in complicated electromagnetic environment. Besides, we also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SCO in impulsive noise suppression theoretically. Further, accurate and robust DOA estimation with high DOF can be realized through the proposed MCA-SCO-MUSIC method, which innovatively fuses the pseudo-covariance matrix generated by SCO into MCA based DOA estimation method. Finally, we conduct a series experiments to evaluate the performance of our proposed method in terms of DOF, generalized signal-to-noise ratio (GSNR), characteristic exponent and number of snapshots. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in enhancing DOF without adding physical array elements. Moreover, the proposed method also exhibits better performance and superior robustness compared to other contrastive methods in impulsive noise environments.