Direction finding with a single spatially stretched vector sensor in the presence of mutual coupling

Abstract This paper is concerned with DOA estimation using a single-electromagnetic vector sensor in the presence of mutual coupling. Firstly, we apply the temporally smoothing technique to improve the identifiability limit of a single-vector sensor. In particular, we establish sufficient conditions for constructing temporally smoothed matrices to resolve K > 2 incompletely polarized (IP) monochromatic signals with a single-vector sensor. Then, we propose an efficient ESPRIT-based method, which does not require any calibration signals or iterative operations, to jointly estimate the azimuth-elevation angles and the mutual coupling coefficients. Finally, we derive the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) for the problem under consideration