Performance Analysis of Fractional Fourier Domain Beam-Forming Methods for Sensor Arrays

ABSTRACT

The problem of estimating the direction of arrival (DoA) of multiple far-field moving targets, producing broad-banded chirp signals, in both active and passive mode of operation is addressed. As the chirp signal, commonly used in both radar and sonar systems is better processed in fractional Fourier domain, the detection is done using fractional Fourier transform (FrFT) in the proposed work. Subsequently, the DoA estimation is achieved using both conventional and subspace methods. Even though FrFT beam-forming method has been studied in the past, its performance in respect of varying signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and multiple target detection has not been extensively analyzed yet. The results of simulation experiments reported in the present work show that FrFT enjoys better estimation accuracy over the conventional frequency domain beam-forming for chirp signals using Fourier transform (FT), in terms of computational efficiency, accuracy and resolution with low SNR, limited snapshots and sensors, and spatially coherent/multi-path signals. The performance metrics used for the study are (i) root mean square error, (ii) 3-dB beam width and (iii) CPU time for accuracy, resolution and computation time, respectively. It is seen from computer simulations that MUSIC outperforms other DoA estimation techniques from the performance curves for both active and passive systems.

Graphical Abstract

KEYWORDS:

• Sensor arrays
• fractional Fourier transform
• chirp signal
• beam-forming
• direction of arrival estimation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.