When doing target parameter estimation with a ULA, is it necessary to use beamforming?

Do you have to use a beamformer, or can you use an algorithm like MUSIC instead?

Answer 1

[Honglei Chen]

That depends on what you want to estimate. For example, if you want to estimate the direction, then you need to have signals from each sensor, so that one does not involve beamforming.

If you want other parameters like frequency, then as long as you have enough SNR, in theory you could do that with signal from an individual sensor in the array. However, beamforming improves SNR of the received signal towards a specific direction, so in general it should help the parameter estimation if you have the knowledge of the direction. Otherwise, you need to estimate that direction first.

HTH

[Aimee Nogoy]

If I have a radar data cube does it make sense to perform MUSIC on each slice along the pulse number?

[Honglei Chen]

You can either do that, or you can coherently combine all pulses together to improve SNR before performing MUSIC (as long as the angle stays approximately the same during all pulses)

[Aimee Nogoy]

Really thank you so much for your help..I'm still having some issues. I am trying to modify the Automotive Adaptive Cruise Control w/FMCW demo with a ULA so that I can estimate DOA in addition to range and velocity of a target. Even after coherently combining the pulses together I'm getting an incorrect estimate from the RootMUSICEstimator object. I am still debugging but should there be any reason why MUSIC is not suitable for this FMCW application?

[Honglei Chen]

It should work unless the signals are correlated. I'm wondering if you are passing more data than needed. You only need to pass in the data that contains the target. Otherwise it would contain more noise. There is a Simulink version of FMCW example in Phased Array System Toolbox that contains angle estimation too. It should be fairly straightforward to translate it to MATLAB. You can find the example at

https://www.mathworks.com/help/phased/examples/automotive-adaptive-cruise-control-using-fmcw-and-mfsk-technology.html

HTH

[Aimee Nogoy]

Okay great!!! Thank you for sharing this example!