Research Article
Estimation of DOA for Noncircular Signals via Vandermonde
Constrained Parallel Factor Analysis
Heyun Lin ,
1
Chaowei Yuan,
1
Jianhe Du,
2
and Zhongwei Hu
1
1
School of Information and Communication Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China
2
School of Information and Engineering, Communication University of China, Beijing 100024, China
Correspondence should be addressed to Heyun Lin; forlan@qq.com
Received 8 June 2017; Revised 21 August 2017; Accepted 12 October 2017; Published 15 January 2018
Academic
Editor:
Pierfrancesco
Lombardo
Copyright © 2018 Heyun Lin et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
We provide a complete study on the direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of noncircular (NC) signals for uniform linear array
(ULA) via Vandermonde constrained parallel factor (PARAFAC) analysis. By exploiting the noncircular property of the signals,
we first construct an extended matrix which contains two times sampling number of the received signal. Then, taking the
Vandermonde structure of the array manifold matrix into account, the extended matrix can be turned into a tensor model
which admits the Vandermonde constrained PARAFAC decomposition. Based on this tensor model, an efficient linear algebra
algorithm is applied to obtain the DOA estimation via utilizing the rotational invariance between two submatrices. Compared
with some existing algorithms, the proposed method has a better DOA estimation performance. Meanwhile, the proposed
method consistently has a higher estimation accuracy and a much lower computational complexity than the trilinear alternating
least square- (TALS-) based PARAFAC algorithm. Finally, numerical examples are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness
of the proposed approach in terms of estimation accuracy and computational complexity.
1. Introduction
Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of signals impinging
on an array of sensors is an important and fundamental issue
in array signal processing due to its wide applications in wire-
less communications, geophysics, radar, and so on [1–3]. In
this context, many DOA estimators have been developed to
solve this problem, such as propagator method (PM) [4],
maximum likelihood (ML) methods [5, 6], tensor-based
method [7], estimation of signal parameters via rotational
invariance technique (ESPRIT) algorithm [8], and multiple
signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm [9].
Unfortunately, all of the above works [4–9] ignore the
characteristics of the incident signals. It has been shown that
the accuracy of DOA estimation can be enhanced by taking
advantage of the noncircular (NC) property of the impinging
signals [10]. Examples of the noncircular signals include
binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) and amplitude-modulated
(AM) signals which are widely applied in wireless telecom-
munication systems. While the property of NC signals is
utilized, the array aperture is virtually doubled in [10], which
yields a better DOA estimation performance than that in
[9]. Besides taking the noncircularity of signals into account,
the maximum number of sources can potentially exceed the
number of array elements. Consequently, solid researches
on NC signals for DOA estimation have appeared in many
literatures [11–14]. NC ESPRIT algorithm and NC Unitary
ESPRIT algorithm for DOA estimation were presented in
[11, 12], respectively. The work [13] developed a low-
complexity noncircular rational invariance propagator
method (NC-RI- PM) for angle estimation, which is used
for uniform linear array (ULA). However, the performance
of the NC-RI-PM became worse rapidly in the case of low
signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The authors in [14] utilized
the parallel factor (PARAFAC) analysis [15] to acquire the
two-dimensional (2D) angle estimation of NC signals for
uniform rectangular array (URA). The main drawback in
[14] is that it has large computational load and is sensitive
to the iterative initial value.
In this paper, we present a Vandermonde constrained
PARAFAC method to improve the DOA estimation accuracy
by taking advantages of the property of NC signals and the
Hindawi
International Journal of Antennas and Propagation
Volume 2018, Article ID 4612583, 9 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/4612583