Impact of linear array geometry on direction-of-arrival estimation for a single source

The analysis is conducted using the Cramer-Rao lower bound simulations and performance modeling of maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE) while assuming a single source of illumination and additive white Gaussian noise. Particular attention is paid to the implementation of the MLE, the threshold signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), probability of outlier, and high SNR mean-squared-error (MSE) performance, which are evaluated and compared for uniform and nonuniform arrays. The conditions under which tradeoffs exist in choosing a particular geometry and their significance are determined.<>