Using deep learning (DL) to achieve direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is an open and meaningful exploration. Existing DL-based methods achieve DOA estimation by spectrum regression or multi-label classification task. While, both of them face the problem of off-grid errors. In this paper, we proposed a cascaded deep neural network (DNN) framework named as off-grid network (OGNet) to provide accurate DOA estimation in the case of off-grid. The OGNet is composed of an autoencoder consisted by fully connected (FC) layers and a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) with 2-dimensional convolutional layers. In the proposed OGNet, the off-grid error is modeled into labels to achieve off-grid DOA estimation based on its sparsity. As compared to the state-of-the-art grid-based methods, the OGNet shows advantages in terms of precision and resolution. The effectiveness and superiority of the OGNet are demonstrated by extensive simulation experiments in different experimental conditions.

This paper proposes a low-complexity variational Bayesian inference (VBI)-based method for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) downlink channel estimation. The temporal correlation at the mobile user side is jointly exploited to enhance the channel estimation performance. The key to the success of the proposed method is the column-independent factorization imposed in the VBI framework. Since we separate the Bayesian inference for each column vector of signal-of-interest, the computational complexity of the proposed method is significantly reduced. Moreover, the temporal correlation is automatically uncoupled to facilitate the updating rule derivation for the temporal correlation itself. Simulation results illustrate the substantial performance improvement achieved by the proposed method.

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation as a fundamental issue in array signal processing has been extensively studied for many applications in military and civilian fields. Many DOA estimation algorithms have been developed for different application scenarios such as low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), limited snapshots, etc. However, there are still some practical problems that make DOA estimation very difficult. One of them is the correlation between sources. In this paper, we develop a sparsity-based method to estimate the DOA of coherent signals with sparse linear array (SLA). We adopt the off-grid signal model and solve the DOA estimation problem in the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) framework. By considering the SLA as a ‘missing sensor’ ULA, our proposed method treats the output of the SLA as a partial output of the corresponding virtual uniform linear array (ULA) to make full use of the expanded aperture character of the SLA. Then we employ the expectation-maximization (EM) method to update the hyper-parameters and the output of the virtual ULA in an iterative manner. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method has a better performance in correlated signal scenarios than the reference methods in comparison, confirming the advantage of exploiting the extended aperture feature of the SLA.

Spatial compressive sensing (SCS) has recently been applied to direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation, owing to its advantages over conventional versions. However the performance of compressive sensing (CS)-based estimation methods degrades when the true DOAs are not exactly on the discretized sampling grid. We solve the off-grid DOA estimation problem using the deterministic maximum likelihood (DML) estimation method. In this letter, on the basis of the convexity of the DML function, we propose a computationally efficient algorithm framework for off-grid DOA estimation. Numerical experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed methods in terms of accuracy, robustness and speed.