  The signal processing community currently witnesses the emergence of sensor
array processing and Direction-of-Arrival (DoA) estimation in various modern
applications, such as automotive radar, mobile user and millimeter wave indoor
localization, drone surveillance, as well as in new paradigms, such as joint
sensing and communication in future wireless systems. This trend is further
enhanced by technology leaps and availability of powerful and affordable
multi-antenna hardware platforms. The history of advances in super resolution
DoA estimation techniques is long, starting from the early parametric
multi-source methods such as the computationally expensive maximum likelihood
(ML) techniques to the early subspace-based techniques such as Pisarenko and
MUSIC. Inspired by the seminal review paper Two Decades of Array Signal
Processing Research: The Parametric Approach by Krim and Viberg published in
the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, we are looking back at another three
decades in Array Signal Processing Research under the classical narrowband
array processing model based on second order statistics. We revisit major
trends in the field and retell the story of array signal processing from a
modern optimization and structure exploitation perspective. In our overview,
through prominent examples, we illustrate how different DoA estimation methods
can be cast as optimization problems with side constraints originating from
prior knowledge regarding the structure of the measurement system. Due to space
limitations, our review of the DoA estimation research in the past three
decades is by no means complete. For didactic reasons, we mainly focus on
developments in the field that easily relate the traditional multi-source
estimation criteria and choose simple illustrative examples.
