Direction of arrival tracking for signals with known waveforms based on block least squares techniques

In this paper, we address the problem of tracking DOA of multiple moving targets with known signal source waveforms and unknown gains in the presence of Gaussian noise using a nonuniform linear array. Herein, we make use of the fact that the output of each sensor can be described as a linear regression model whose coefficients each contain a pair of DOA and gain information corresponding to one target. These coefficients are determined by solving a linear least squares (LS) problem and then updated recursively based on a block QR decomposition recursive least squares (QRD-RLS) technique or a block regularized LS technique. Since the coefficients from different sensors have the same amplitude but variable phase information for the same signal, along with simple algebraic manipulations the well-known generalized least squares (GLS) are used to obtain an asymptotically-optimal DOA estimate without requiring a search over a large region of the parameter space. Computer simulations show that the proposed DOA tracking techniques when applied to a sparse antenna array can provide a better tracking performance than some of the existing methods do.