Block rank sparsity-aware DOA estimation with large-scale arrays in the presence of unknown mutual coupling.

With the development of massive multiple-input mutiple-output (MIMO) technique, high-resolution direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation has attracted great attention. A novel sparse signal reconstruction method based on the inherent block rank sparsity of the sub-matrix is proposed for high resolution DOA estimation with large-scale arrays under the condition of unknown mutual coupling. In the proposed method, by taking advantage of the banded symmetric Toeplitz structure of the mutual coupling matrix (MCM), a novel block representation model is firstly formulated by parameterizing the steering vector. Then, exploiting the inherent block sparsity characteristics of the sub-matrix, a reweighted nuclear norm minimization algorithm is proposed to reconstruct the sparse matrix, in which the weighted matrix is designed by using the spectrum of MUSIC-Like algorithm. Finally, the DOAs are achieved by searching the non-zeros blocks of the recovered matrix. The proposed method not only makes full use of the block rank sparsity characteristics of the sub-matrix and weighted matrix for enhancing the sparse solution, but also avoids the array aperture loss. Thus, the proposed method has superior estimation performance than the state-of-the-art algorithms under the condition of unknown mutual coupling. Especially, in the case of large-scale antennas, the advantage of the proposed method is more obvious. Some computer simulation results are performed to verify the advantage of our proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]