Performance analysis for DOA estimation algorithms: unification,simplification, and observations

Subspace based direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation has motivated many performance studies, but limitations such as the assumption of an infinite amount of data and analysis of individual algorithms generally exist in these performance studies. The authors have previously proposed a unified performance analysis based on a finite amount of data and achieved a tractable expression for the mean-squared DOA estimation error for the multiple signal classification (MUSIC). Min-Norm, estimation of signal parameters using rotational invariance techniques (ESPRIT), and state-space realization algorithms. However, this expression uses the singular values and vectors of a data matrix, which are obtained by the highly nonlinear transformation of the singular value decomposition (SVD). Thus the effects of the original data parameters such as numbers of sensors and snapshots, source coherence and separations were not explicitly analyzed. The authors unify and simplify this previous result and derive a unified expression based on the original data parameters. They analytically observe the effects of these parameters on the estimation error