The man-made cyclostationary signals have been widely used in many fields

such as signal detection

parameters estimation and beam forming etc.

because of its special property of cyclostationarity and periodicity.An effective algorithm referred to as the SC-SSF method has been developed by G.H.Xu to estimate direction of arrival (DOA) of radio waves impinging on the sensor arrays.But it is inconvenient to be put into practice in many practical applications

due to the difficulty in determining the size of the data matrix.To solve such a problem

a solution is introduced in this paper in detail.It analyzes the disadvantage of SC-SSF algorithm at first.And then a more general array signal model is obtained by passing the spectral autocorrelation function through a specifically designed filter.Thus a new DOA estimation method based on the new array signal model is developed as generalized SC-SSF (GSC-SSF)

which utilizes MUSIC or ESPRIT algorithm to accomplish the DOA estimation.With the simulation

the new method proves to be more convenient and effective than SC-SSF in suppressing noises and forming the data matrix (or called the covariance matrix).