Interference Canceler Array with Reference Generating Loop

Adaptive arrays utilizing an internally generated reference signal to drive least mean square (LMS) weight determining loops have experienced difficulty arising from phase shifts induced by the reference generating circuits. The phenomenon observed is that the expected value of the weights oscillate in the steady state modulating the incoming signal. A scheme is reported which avoids this problem. It differs from earlier methods in that the reference generator has no infinite limiter so that the amplitude of the reference is not constant and in that one element is left unweighted. Alternative schemes were considered wherein the reference signal is drawn from all the array elements or from the weighted elements only. Only the latter is fully reported here, and is found superior. It is shown that in the presence of a desired signal and independent element noise, the processing scheme proposed produces weights whose expected values converge to a constant nonoscillatory state provided certain mild constraints are satisfied. In particular, if a cos ϕ <1, a being the gain and ϕ the phase shift of the filter in the reference generator, the weights converge. In addition, the steady state signal-to-noise power ratio (SNR) is determined. It is found that with a cos ϕ close to unity the SNR is that of an (N-1) element array coherently combined, where N is the number of elements. The SNR falls off with departures of a and ϕ from 1 and 0, respectively, but not drastically.