MVDR Beamformer Design by Imposing Unit Circle Roots Constraints for Uniform Linear Arrays

A 2004 paper had offered a theoretical proof that ideally the roots of the minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer array polynomial lie on the unit circle (UC). However, existing MVDR methods fail to exploit this fundamental property adequately. This paper proposes a new adaptive beamforming design via UC roots optimization for uniform linear arrays (ULA). The proposed method starts with the sample matrix inversion (SMI) roots and optimizes the MVDR criterion for each root separately by splitting the $N$-dimensional MVDR problem into multiple 1-D optimization problems. Conjugate symmetry is imposed on individual 1st-order factors of the MVDR polynomial during optimization that guarantees UC roots. The proposed UC Roots Constrained MVDR (UCRC-MVDR) method is non-iterative and has a closed-form solution. It also works well with limited number of snapshots. UCRC-MVDR is computationally efficient and parallelizable as all roots can be optimized concurrently. In extensive simulation studies, UCRC-MVDR exhibits consistently superior performance over existing MVDR approaches, and its performance is closer to the ideal clairvoyant case than existing MVDR methods.