An automatically paired two-dimensional direction-of-arrival estimation method for two parallel uniform linear arrays

In two-dimensional (2-D) direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation, paring the azimuth and elevation angles of multiple sources is an important issue. In this letter, we propose a new automatically paired 2-D DOA estimation method by designing the geometry of two antenna subarrays and using the propagator method (PM). A special geometry between two parallel uniform linear arrays (ULAs) with a position displacement on the axial direction is proposed to facilitate the elevation and azimuth pairing and estimation. The simulation results have shown that the proposed method can achieve the same 2-D DOA estimation performance as the existing methods, while the complexity is reduced considerably.