Fast 2D-DOA Estimation for Polarized Massive MIMO Systems With Irregularly Spaced Sensors

Irregularly spaced arrays are appearing in diverse areas, such as wearable devices, stealth aircrafts. This paper studies the two-dimensional (2D) direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation issue for an irregularly spaced electromagnetic vector sensor (EMVS) array. An estimation method of signal parameters via rotational invariance technique (ESPRIT) approach is developed. Unlike existing ESPRIT-like algorithms, the proposed approach in this paper not only estimates the rough directional cosine waveform via the rotational invariance of the polarized response matrix, but also finds the refined directional cosine waveform via the rotational invariance of the spatial response matrix. This proposed algorithm is capable of offering closed-form analytics, thus greatly facilitating 2D-DOA estimation. Numerical results shown in this paper verify that the proposed approach outperforms existing ESPRIT-like algorithms at a sightly increased costs of computation. In addition, numerical results presented in this paper for the proposed 2D-DOA estimation approach also corroborate the theoretical derivations.