This article proposes a direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation algorithm for a random sparse linear array based on a novel graph neural network (GNN). Unlike convolutional layers and fully connected layers, which do not interact well with information between different antennas, the GNN model can adapt to the goniometry problem of non-uniform random sparse linear arrays without any prior information by applying neighbor nodes' aggregation and update operations. This helps the model in learning signal features under complex environmental conditions. We train the model in an end-to-end way to reduce the complexity of the network. Experiments are conducted on the uniform and sparse linear arrays for various signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and numbers of snapshots for comparison. We prove that the GNN model has superior angle estimation performance on arrays with large sparsity that cannot be used by traditional algorithms and surpasses existing deep learning models based on convolutional or fully connected structures. The proposed algorithm shows excellent DOA estimation performance under the complex conditions of limited snapshots, low signal-to-noise ratio, and large array sparsity as well. In addition, the algorithm has a low time calculation cost and is suitable for scenarios that require low latency.
Keywords: array signal processing; direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation; graph neural network; single snapshot; sparse linear array.