Joint estimation of direction of departure and direction of arrival for multiple‐input multiple‐output radar based on improved joint ESPRIT method

This study presents an improved joint estimation method of signal parameters via rotational invariance technique (ESPRIT) algorithm for low‐complexity simultaneous estimation of direction of departure (DOD) and direction of arrival (DOA) in a multiple‐input–multiple‐output radar system. The proposed algorithm is based on a data matrix and estimates DOD and DOA without a pairing operation. The computational complexity of the proposed joint ESPRIT algorithm is derived to be less than that of conventional two dimension multiple signal classification (2D‐MUSIC) and reduced dimension multiple signal classification. The authors’ simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves performance very close to that of 2D‐MUSIC and better performance than that of the ESPRIT algorithm.