A rank-reduction based 2-D DOA estimation algorithm for three parallel uniform linear arrays

A new algorithm involving two-dimensional (2-D) direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is proposed. By treating three uniform linear arrays (ULA) as sub-arrays displaced from a virtual ULA, we use the rank-reduction (RARE) estimator to transform the 2-D DOA searching into several one-dimensional (1-D) searching. The proposed method increases the array aperture utilization of the three parallel ULAs and can resolve more signals, compared with other propagator method (PM) based methods. Numerical simulations verify the efficiency of the proposed algorithm and illustrate the performance improvement.