Robust Adaptive Beamforming against Signal Steering Vector Mismatch and Jammer Motion

Abstract

Since adaptive beamformer suffers from output performance degradation in the presence of interference nonstationarity and signal steering vector mismatch, a novel robust null broadening adaptive beamforming is proposed. The proposed method is realized by the combination of projection transform and diagonal loading techniques. First, a new projection matrix with null broadening ability is constructed and then projects the array received data onto the projection matrix. With the diagonal loading technique, a new sample covariance matrix is obtained. The theoretical analysis shows that the projection transform operation can expand the incident direction of the interference and improve orthogonality between the signal-plus-interference and the noise subspaces; thus the proposed beamformer can effectively broaden the jammer null and enhance the null depth. The analytical expressions of the proposed algorithm are also provided, which are efficient and easily solved. Simulation results are presented and demonstrated that the proposed beamformer can provide strong robustness against signal steering vector mismatch and jammer motion.