Effect of mutual coupling on the performance of Direction-of-arrival estimation of compact array

With the recent advancement in microwave hardware, there has been significant focus on developing compact antenna arrays with element separation less than half wavelength. Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is an important application for antenna arrays but yet not much work has been done on DOA estimation using compact arrays. In particular, as the element separation becomes smaller, the undesirable mutual coupling effect between antenna elements becomes much stronger which can significantly degrade the accuracy of DOA estimation. \ua9 2010 IEEE