This paper proposes a novel method for two-dimensional (2-D) direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation of multiple signals employing a sparse L-shaped array structured by a sparse linear array (SLA), a sparse uniform linear array (SULA) and an auxiliary sensor. In this method, the elevation angles are estimated by using the SLA and an efficient search approach, while the azimuth angle estimation is performed in two stages. In the first stage, the rough azimuth angle estimates are obtained by utilizing a noise-free cross-covariance matrix (CCM), the estimated elevation angles and data from three sensors including the auxiliary sensor. In the second stage, the fine azimuth angle estimates can be achieved by using the shift-invariance property of the SULA and the rough azimuth angle estimates. Without extra pair-matching process, the proposed method can achieve automatic pairing of the 2-D DOA estimates. Simulation results show that our approach outperforms the compared methods, especially in the cases of low SNR, snapshot deficiency and multiple sources.

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is an important part of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). VANETs can realize communication between moving vehicles, infrastructures and other intelligent mobile terminals, which can greatly improve the road safety and traffic efficiency effectively. Existing studies of vehicular ad hoc network usually consider only one data transmission model, while the increasing density of traffic data sources means that the vehicular ad hoc network is evolving into Heterogeneous Vehicular Network (HetVNET) which needs hybrid data transmission scheme. Considering the Heterogeneous Vehicular Network, this paper presents a hybrid transmission MAC protocol including vehicle to vehicle communication (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure communication (V2I/I2V). In this protocol, the data are identified according to timeliness, on the base of the traditional V2V and V2I/I2V communication. If the time-sensitive data (V2V data) fail in transmission, the node transmits the data to the base station and let the base station cooperatively transmit the data with higher priority. This transmission scheme uses the large transmission range of base station in an effective manner. In this paper, the queueing models of the vehicles and base station are analyzed respectively by one-dimensional and two-dimensional Markov Chain, and the expressions of throughput, packet drop rate and delay are also derived. The simulation results show that this MAC protocol can improve the transmission efficiency of V2V communication and reduce the delay of V2V data without losing the system performance.

In this paper, a new parameter estimator for coherently distributed (CD) noncircular (NC) signals is proposed, and can estimate both the central direction-of-arrivals (DOAs) and the angular spreads. It can also be considered as an extended version of the generalized Capon method by using both covariance matrix and an elliptic covariance matrix. The central DOAs and angular spreads are obtained by two-dimensional spectrum-peak searching. Numerical examples illustrate that the proposed method can estimate the central DOAs and the angular spreads when the number of signals is greater than the number of sensors. The proposed method also offers better performance than the methods against which it is compared.