Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation for non-Gaussian signals using three-level nested array (THL-NA) is investigated in this paper. Motivation from larger consecutive degree of freedom (DOF) and array aperture, the THL-NA is proposed, which can take full advantages of the consecutive coarrays of TL-NA and has the closed-form expression of DOF. Specifically, firstly, the array aperture is expanded by the second order sum coarray (2-SC) of the proposed array, secondly, the nested relationship between subarrays is employed to obtain the difference coarray of 2-SC (2-DCSC), finally, a consecutive virtual array with large array aperture is obtained. Besides, a successive SS-MUSIC algorithm is proposed, which employs the spatial smoothing estimating signal parameter via rotational invariance techniques (SS-ESPRIT) algorithm and partial spectrum searching multiple signal classification (PSS-MUSIC) to obtain initial estimations and fine estimations, respectively, resulting in a better balance between computational complexity and estimation accuracy.

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