We propose a low complexity subspace-based direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation algorithm employing a direct signal space construction method (DSPCM) by subsampling the autocorrelation matrix of a uniform linear array (ULA). Three major contributions of this paper are as follows. First of all, we introduce the method of autocorrelation matrix subsampling which enables us to employ a low complexity algorithm based on a ULA without computationally complex eigenvalue decomposition or

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... e decomposition. Secondly, we introduce a signal vector separation method to improve the distinguishability among signal vectors, which can greatly improve the performance, particularly, in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Thirdly, we provide a root finding (RF) method in addition to a spectral search (SS) method as the angle finding scheme. Through simulations, we illustrate that the performance of the proposed scheme is reasonably close to computationally much more expensive MUSIC- (MUltiple SIgnal Classification-) based algorithms. Finally, we illustrate that the computational complexity of the proposed scheme is reduced, in comparison with those of MUSIC-based schemes, by a factor ofO(N2/K), whereKis the number of sources andNis the number of antenna elements.