Quadratically Constrained Beamforming Robust Against Direction-of-Arrival Mismatch

It is well known that the performance of the minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer is very sensitive to steering vector mismatch. Such mismatches can occur as a result of direction-of-arrival (DOA) errors, local scattering, near-far spatial signature mismatch, waveform distortion, source spreading, imperfectly calibrated arrays and distorted antenna shape. In this paper, an adaptive beamformer that is robust against the DOA mismatch is proposed. This method imposes two quadratic constraints such that the magnitude responses of two steering vectors exceed unity. Then, a diagonal loading method is used to force the magnitude responses at the arrival angles between these two steering vectors to exceed unity. Therefore, this method can always force the gains at a desired range of angles to exceed a constant level while suppressing the interferences and noise. A closed-form solution to the proposed minimization problem is introduced, and the diagonal loading factor can be computed systematically by a proposed algorithm. Numerical examples show that this method has excellent signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio performance and a complexity comparable to the standard MVDR beamformer

Constant beamwidth generalised sidelobe canceller

In this paper, we proposed a constant beamwidth discrete Fourier transform (DFT) beamformer based on the generalised sidelobe canceller (GSC). Broadband signals are decomposed into frequency bins which are grouped into octaves and tapered individually. The resulting beampattern possesses constant beamwidth across the entire operating spectrum, thus ensuring uniform spatial resolution. Further incorporation of the GSC allows adaptive nulling of interference to coincide with uniform resolution, enhancing the beamformer’s performance. However, modification to the constraint equation of the standard GSC is required to account for the frequency-dependent weighting of sensors

A class of constant modulus algorithms for uniform linear arrays with a conjugate symmetric constraint

A class of constant modulus algorithms (CMAs) subject to a conjugate symmetric constraint is proposed for blind beamforming based on the uniform linear array structure. The constraint is derived from the beamformer with an optimum output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). The effect of the additional constraint is equivalent to adding a second step to the original adaptive algorithms. The proposed approach is general and can be applied to both the traditional CMA and its all kinds of variants, such as the linearly constrained CMA (LCCMA) and the least squares CMA (LSCMA) as two examples. With this constraint, the modified CMAs will always generate a weight vector in the desired form for each update and the number of adaptive variables is effectively reduced by half, leading to a much improved overall performance. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved