Direction-of-Arrival Estimation with Diversely Polarized Sparse Arrays

Thinned arrays provide larger apertures and consequently better resolution than fully populated arrays with the same number of antennas. Sparse arrays, such as Minimum Redundancy Arrays (MRA), coprime arrays and nested arrays, are a subclass of thinned arrays. They are designed to have coarrays corresponding to a larger (virtual) uniform linear array. By exploiting the coarray structure the MUSIC algorithm can be applied to identify more signals than the number of antennas in the array. The work on sparse arrays as well as much of the work on thinned arrays assumes that the antennas are isotropic or omnidirectional and that there is no mutual coupling nor sensitivity to signal polarization. In this paper we study the impact of coupling and polarization on these arrays.