Efficient beamspace eigen-based direction of arrival estimation schemes

The MUltiple SIgnal Classification (MUSIC) algorithm developed in the late 70\u27s was the first vector subspace approach used to accurately determine the arrival angles of signal wavefronts impinging upon an array of sensors. As facilitated by the geometry associated with the common uniform linear array of sensors, a root-based formulation was developed to replace the computationally intensive spectral search process and was found to offer an enhanced resolution capability in the presence of two closely-spaced signals. Operation in beamspace, where sectors of space are individually probed via a pre-processor operating on the sensor data, was found to offer both a performance benefit and a reduced computational complexity resulting from the reduced data dimension associated with beamspace processing. Little progress, however, has been made in the development of a computationally efficient Root-MUSIC algorithm in a beamspace setting. Two approaches of efficiently arriving at a Root-MUSIC formulation in beamspace are developed and analyzed in this Thesis. In the first approach, a structural constraint is placed on the beamforming vectors that can be exploited to yield a reduced order polynomial whose roots provide information on the signal arrival angles. The second approach is considerably more general, and hence, applicable to any vector subspace angle estimation algorithm. In this approach, classical multirate digital signal processing is applied to effectively reduce the dimension of the vectors that span the signal subspace, leading to an efficient beamspace Root-MUSIC (or ESPRIT) algorithm. An auxiliary, yet important, observation is shown to allow a real-valued eigenanalysis of the beamspace sample covariance matrix to provide a computational savings as well as a performance benefit, particularly in the case of correlated signal scenes. A rigorous theoretical analysis, based upon derived large-sample statistics of the signal subspace eigenvectors, is included to provide insight into the operation of the two algorithmic methodologies employing the real-valued processing enhancement. Numerous simulations are presented to validate the theoretical angle bias and variance expressions as well as to assess the merit of the two beamspace approaches