Sum-Difference Analysis Based Design for Third-Order Sparse Arrays

Recently, third-order cumulants (TOCs) as a non-conventional odd-order statistics, has been introduced to direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation with the third-order nested array (TONA), which significantly increases the number of uniform degrees-of-freedom (uDOFs) and can even be comparable to the fourth-order cumulant approach. In this paper, through analysis of the second-order sum-difference co-array, a third-order sparse linear array (SLA) design scheme suitable for TOCs is proposed, which can extend the commonly used second-order SLAs to the third-order. By selecting an appropriate generator array, the derived third-order SLA has far more uDOFs than the existing TONA, greatly improving its DOA estimation accuracy.