Beamforming using passive nested arrays of sensors

A novel approach to beamforming using a new class of sensor arrays is proposed, which can increase the achievable degrees of freedom significantly beyond the conventional limits obtained from uniform linear arrays (ULA). This class of arrays is named as "nested arrays" since they are obtained by nesting two or more ULAs with increasing inter-sensor spacing. Using the second order statistics of the signal received by such an array in a novel way, it is possible to perform beamforming with O(N
²
) de grees of freedom using only O(N) physical elements. This kind of beamforming will be shown to be essentially non linear in nature and theoretically, it is capable of nulling the effect of noise provided enough snapshots are available.