Array geometry impact on music in the presence of spatially distributed sources

The MUltiple SIgnal Classification (MUSIC) estimator has been widely studied for a long time for its high resolution capability in the domain of the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation, with the sources assumed to be point. However, when the actual sources are spatially distributed with angular dispersion, the performance of the conventional MUSIC is degraded. In this paper, the impact of the array geometry on the DOA estimation of spatially distributed sources impinging on a sensor array is considered. Taking into account a coherently distributed source model, we establish closed-form expressions of the MUSIC-based DOA estimation error as a function of the positions of the array sensors in the presence of model errors due to the angular dispersion of the signal sources. The impact of the array geometry is studied and particular array designs are proposed to make DOA estimation more robust to source dispersion. The analytical results are validated by numerical simulations.1