Direction Finding of Electromagnetic Sources on a Sparse Cross-Dipole Array Using One-Bit Measurements

Sparse array arrangement has been widely used in vector-sensor arrays because of increased degree-of-freedoms for identifying more sources than sensors. For large-size sparse vector-sensor arrays, one-bit measurements can further reduce the receiver system complexity by using low-resolution ADCs. In this paper, we present a sparse cross-dipole array with one-bit measurements to estimate Direction of Arrivals (DOA) of electromagnetic sources. Based on the independence assumption of sources, we establish the relation between the covariance matrix of one-bit measurements and that of unquantized measurements by Bussgang Theorem. Then we develop a Spatial-Smooth MUSIC (SS-MUSIC) based method, One-Bit MUSIC (OB-MUSIC), to estimate the DOAs. By jointly utilizing the covariance matrices of two dipole arrays, we find that OB-MUSIC is robust against polarization states. We also derive the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) of DOA estimation for the proposed scheme. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze the applicability of the independence assumption of sources, which is the fundamental of the proposed and other typical methods, and verify the assumption in typical communication applications. Numerical results show that, with the same number of sensors, one-bit sparse cross-dipole arrays have comparable performance with unquantized uniform linear arrays and thus provide a compromise between the DOA estimation performance and the system complexity.