Distributed source modeling and direction-of-arrival estimation techniques

In direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation, the direction of a signal is usually assumed to be a point. If the direction of a signal is distributed due to some environmental phenomenon, however, DOA estimation methods based on the point source assumption may result in poor performance. In this paper, we consider DOA estimation when the signal sources are distributed. Parametric and nonparametric models are proposed, and estimation methods are considered under these models. In addition, the asymptotic distribution of estimation errors is obtained to show the models’ statistical properties.