Computationally efficient 2D direction finding and polarization estimation with arbitrarily spaced electromagnetic vector sensors at unknown locations using the propagator method

This paper proposes a computationally efficient method for estimating angle of arrival and polarization parameters of multiple farfield narrowband diversely polarized electromagnetic sources, using arbitrarily spaced electromagnetic vector sensors at unknown locations. The electromagnetic vector sensor is six-component in composition, consisting of three orthogonal electric dipoles plus three orthogonal magnetic loops, collocating in space. The presented method is based on an estimation method named propagator, which requires only linear operations but no eigenvalue decomposition or singular value decomposition into the signal and noise subspaces, to estimate the scaled electromagnetic vector sensors' steering vectors and then to estimate the azimuth arrival angle, the elevation arrival angle, and the polarization parameters. Comparing with its ESPRIT counterpart [K.T. Wong, M.D. Zoltowski, Closed-form direction finding and polarization estimation with arbitrarily spaced electromagnetic vector-sensors at unknown locations, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat. 48 (5) (2000) 671–681], the propagator method has its computational complexity reduced by this ratio: the number of sources to sextuple the number of vector sensors. Simulation results show that at high and medium signal-to-noise ratio, the proposed propagator method's estimation accuracy is similar to its ESPRIT counterpart.