Photonic direction-of-arrival estimation based on compressive sensing

The optical approach to estimate the direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of microwave signals has attracted a lot of attention recently. Most of existing methods are based on a one-sensor array system, which converts the DOA estimation problem into an optical power estimation problem. Their main disadvantage is that additional work is needed

to represent the relationship between the phase shifts and the optical powers before estimation. The algorithm proposed in this paper is based on an N-sensor array (N>2), where the optical power vector is obtained first and then a compressive sensing based approach is applied to directly estimate the phase shift. As demonstrated by simulation results, the proposed algorithm can achieve much better estimation accuracy and robustness than existing optical DOA estimation algorithms considered.