Array Signal Processing for Maximum Likelihood Direction-of-Arrival Estimation

Abstract

Emitter Direction-of-Arrival (DOA) estimation is a fundamental problem in a variety of applications including radar, sonar, and wireless communications. The research has received considerable attention in literature and numerous methods have been proposed. Maximum Likelihood (ML) is a nearly optimal technique producing superior estimates compared to other methods especially in unfavorable conditions, and thus is of significant practical interest. This paper discusses in details the techniques for ML DOA estimation in either white Gaussian noise or unknown noise environment. Their performances are analyzed and compared, and evaluated against the theoretical lower bounds