An adaptive diagonal loading technique to improve direction of arrival estimation accuracy for linear antenna array sensors

Diagonal loading is one of the most widely used and effective methods to improve the robustness of both adaptive beamformers and Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation due to the involvement of the sensor received covariance matrix. In addition, subspace-based DOA estimation techniques rely on multiple snapshots to achieve high estimation accuracies. This paper presents the study of a modified diagonally loaded sample covariance matrix for accurate DOA estimation in adverse scenarios. The proposed and novel technique deciphers poor DOA estimation in a low SNR environment by computationally changing the received sample covariance matrix. Our method is computationally simple as it does not require peak searching and does not depend on the coherency of the signal. The efficacy of the proposed method is examined via computer simulation for various sensor array sizes and the number of snapshot samples. Based on our numerical simulation results, our proposed method generally outperforms most state-of-the-art DOA estimators. In a finite number of snapshots and a single signal source, our proposed method performs 9.5% better than the state-of-the-art DOA estimation technique, 2.8% in multiple signal sources, and 8.5% in a single snapshot, single signal source environment of gained DOA estimation performance