2D Direction of Arrival Estimation in Distributed Non-Coherent Array Radar

Distributed non-coherent array radar effectively expands radar aperture while reducing radar hardware costs. The existing direction of arrival (DOA) estimation methods in distributed array radar mainly use the phase of the signals from each subarray. However, the non-coherent condition makes the phase relationship between each subarray chaotic which makes the existing methods no longer effective. In this paper, a method is proposed for 2D-DOA estimation in distributed non-coherent array radar. In this method, the signals of each subarray will be jointly processed to avoid the influence of the non-coherent condition. In experiment and simulation, we used distributed non-coherent array radar to estimate the 2D-DOA of multiple targets, and compared the result of our method with centralized array radar. The result shows that our method can separate the targets, while centralized array radar cannot, indicating that our method can achieve 2D-DOA estimation under the non-coherent condition and has higher angular resolution compared to the centralized array radar. Our method can be widely applied to autonomous vehicles and observational astronomy. It can effectively expand the radar aperture with the same number of antennas and reduce the hardware costs by eliminating the hardware devices which are used to meet the coherent condition.