Direction-of-arrival estimation of multipath signals using independent component analysis and compressive sensing

Multipath signal is often considered an interference that must be removed. The coherence between multipath and direct component makes it difficult to use conventional direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation methods in a smart antenna system. This study demonstrates a new multipath signal DOA estimation technique. Unlike the common methods, without decoherence preprocessing, the proposed algorithm first apply a complex fast independent component analysis (cFastICA) algorithm to obtain the steering vectors with multipath information that corresponds to each source signal. Then, according to the special structure of the obtained steering vectors and spatial sparsity of the multipath signal components, the algorithm uses the solution of the sparse signal reconstruction problem in the compressive sensing (CS) theory, and the DOA estimation of the multipath signal is translated into an l1 norm minimization problem. Finally, we search the space spectrums to acquire the DOAs for each direct component and multipath component. Comparative simulation tests and analysis prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in estimation accuracy in underdetermined conditions.