Single snapshot spatial smoothing with improved effective array aperture

Spatial smoothing is a widely used preprocessing scheme for direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of more than one source from a single snapshot, although the effective array aperture gets reduced by this process. In this paper we propose a preprocessing scheme applicable for DOA estimation algorithms that exploit the shift invariance property of the array steering matrix and call it spatial smoothing with improved aperture (SSIA). SSIA, when applied to a noise corrupted data vector, improves the effective array aperture significantly as opposed to conventional spatial smoothing. Simulations confirm the significant performance gain provided by SSIA in conjunction with Unitary ESPRIT. © 2009 IEEE.