A comprehensive error calibration method based on dual uniform circular array

Based on the dual uniform circular array, a novel method is proposed to estimate the direction-of-arrival (DOA) and jointly calibrate gain-phase errors, position errors, and mutual coupling errors. In this paper, only one auxiliary source is required to generate three time-disjoint calibration sources with the help of the rotation platform. Subsequently, according to the principle that the signal subspace is orthogonal to the noise subspace, the cost function is constructed. The alternating iteration method is used to estimate the coefficients of the three kinds of errors. During the process, the proposed algorithm makes full use of the structural characteristics of the array when estimating mutual coupling errors, while the signal phase matrix is used to eliminate the phase influence caused by the delay in signal arrival at the antenna array when estimating gain-phase errors and position errors. Compared with the algorithm using multidimensional nonlinear search, the proposed algorithm has lower computational complexity. Moreover, our algorithm does not require additional auxiliary sensors. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is effective and can precisely and comprehensively calibrate the errors in a dual uniform circular array.