Direction finding and mutual coupling estimation for uniform rectangular arrays

•We create a general mutual coupling model for uniform rectangular array (URA).•The steering vector of a URA with mutual coupling is similar to that of a ULA.•An array calibration algorithm without auxiliary sensors for URAs is proposed.•Our algorithm has a better performance than auxiliary sensor based algorithms.

A novel two-dimensional (2-D) direct-of-arrival (DOA) and mutual coupling coefficients estimation algorithm for uniform rectangular arrays (URAs) is proposed. A general mutual coupling model is first built based on banded symmetric Toeplitz matrices, and then it is proved that the steering vector of a URA in the presence of mutual coupling has a similar form to that of a uniform linear array (ULA). The 2-D DOA estimation problem can be solved using the rank-reduction method. With the obtained DOA information, we can further estimate the mutual coupling coefficients. A better performance is achieved by our proposed algorithm than those auxiliary sensor-based ones, as verified by simulation results.