Improved MDL method for estimation of source number at subarray level.

The eigenvalue‐based minimum description length (MDL) method for source number estimation is widely applied in practical scenarios. However, the performance of the MDL method degrades significantly when it is applied to an asymmetrical subarray situation due to the inequality of the noise power of each channel. Therefore, an improved MDL method for subarray level is proposed by normalising noise power to reconstruct the received signal covariance matrix. Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the conventional source number estimation methods for a subarray situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]