Robust adaptive beamforming using a Bayesian steering vector error model

We propose a Bayesian approach to robust adaptive beamforming which entails considering the steering vector of interest as a random variable with some prior distribution. The latter can be tuned in a simple way to reflect how far is the actual steering vector from its presumed value. Two different priors are proposed, namely a Bingham prior distribution and a distribution that directly reveals and depends upon the angle between the true and presumed steering vector. Accordingly, a non-informative prior is assigned to the interference plus noise covariance matrix R, which can be viewed as a means to introduce diagonal loading in a Bayesian framework. The minimum mean square distance estimate of the steering vector as well as the minimum mean square error estimate of R are derived and implemented using a Gibbs sampling strategy. Numerical simulations show that the new beamformers possess a very good rate of convergence even in the presence of steering vector errors

Spectrum Sharing in Wireless Networks via QoS-Aware Secondary Multicast Beamforming

Secondary spectrum usage has the potential to considerably increase spectrum utilization. In this paper, quality-of-service (QoS)-aware spectrum underlay of a secondary multicast network is considered. A multiantenna secondary access point (AP) is used for multicast (common information) transmission to a number of secondary single-antenna receivers. The idea is that beamforming can be used to steer power towards the secondary receivers while limiting sidelobes that cause interference to primary receivers. Various optimal formulations of beamforming are proposed, motivated by different ldquocohabitationrdquo scenarios, including robust designs that are applicable with inaccurate or limited channel state information at the secondary AP. These formulations are NP-hard computational problems; yet it is shown how convex approximation-based multicast beamforming tools (originally developed without regard to primary interference constraints) can be adapted to work in a spectrum underlay context. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches and provide insights on the tradeoffs between different design criteria

Tight Probabilistic SINR Constrained Beamforming Under Channel Uncertainties

In downlink multi-user beamforming, a single bases- tation is serving a number of users simultaneously. However, energy intended for one user may leak to other unintended users, causing interference. With signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) being one of the most crucial quality metrics to users, beamforming design with SINR guarantee has always been an important research topic. However, when the channel state information is not accurate, the SINR requirements become probabilistic constraints, which unfortunately are not tractable analytically for general uncertainty distribution. Therefore, ex- isting probabilistic beamforming methods focus on the relatively simple Gaussian and uniform channel uncertainties, and mainly rely on probability inequality based approximated solutions, resulting in conservative SINR outage realizations. In this paper, based on the local structure of the feasible set in the probabilistic beamforming problem, a systematic method is proposed to realize tight SINR outage control for a large class of channel uncertainty distributions. With channel estimation and quantization errors as examples, simulation results show that the SINR outage can be re- alized tightly, which results in reduced transmit power compared to the existing inequality based probabilistic beamformers.published_or_final_versio

On the relationship between robust minimum variance beamformers with probabilistic and worst-case distortionless response constraints

Abstract—An interesting relationship between the probability-con-strained and worst-case optimization based robust minimum variance (MV) beamformers has been discovered. It is shown that both in the cases of circularly symmetric Gaussian and worst-case distributions of the steering vector mismatch, the probability-constrained robust MV beam-forming problem can be tightly approximated as a convex second-order cone programming (SOCP) problem. The latter problem is mathematically equivalent to that resulting from the deterministic worst-case approach and, therefore, probability-constrained beamformers can be interpreted and implemented using their deterministic worst-case counterparts. How-ever, an important advantage of the developed probability-constrained MV beamformers with respect to their standard worst-case counterparts is that the former approaches enable to explicitly quantify the parameters of the uncertainty region in terms of the beamformer outage probability. Index Terms—Probabilistic distortionless response constraints, robust minimum variance beamforming. I