Linear prediction approach to direction estimation of cyclostationary signals in multipath environment

In this paper, we investigate the estimation of the directions-of-arrival (DOA) of closely spaced narrowband cyclostationary signals in the presence of multipath propagation. By exploiting the spatial and temporal properties of most communication signals, we propose a new cyclic forward-backward linear prediction (FBLP) approach for coherent signals impinging on a uniform linear array (ULA). In the proposed algorithm, the evaluation of the cyclic array covariance matrix is avoided, and the difficulty of choosing the optimal time lag parameter is alleviated. As a result, the proposed approach has two advantages: 1) The computational load is relatively reduced, and 2) the robustness of estimation is significantly improved. The performance of the proposed approach is confirmed through numerical examples, and it is shown that this approach is superior in resolving the closely spaced coherent signals with a small length of array data and at relatively low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).