SDOAnet: An Efficient Deep Learning-Based DOA

Estimation Network for Imperfect Array

Abstract
Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation is a fundamental problem in both
conventional radar and wireless communication applications and emerging
integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems. Due to many
imperfect factors in the low-cost systems, including the antenna position
perturbations, the inconsistent gains/phases, the mutual coupling effect,
the nonlinear amplifier effect, etc., the performance of the DOA estimation
often degrades significantly. To characterize the realistic array more
accurately, a novel deep learning (DL)-based DOA estimation method
named super-resolution DOA network (SDOAnet) is proposed in this paper.
Different from the existing DL-based DOA methods, our proposed SDOAnet
employs the sampled received signals, instead of the covariance matrices of
the received signals, as the input of the convolution layers for extracting
data features. Moreover, the output of SDOAnet is a vector that is
independent of the DOA of targets but can be used to estimate their spatial
spectrum. As a result, the same training network can be applied with any
number of targets, which significantly reduce the implementation
complexity. At last, the convergence speed of our SDOAnet with a low-
dimension network structure is much faster than existing DL-based
methods. Simulation results show that the proposed SDOAnet outperforms
the existing DOA estimation methods with the effect of the imperfect array.