An Approach to Discrete Receive Beamforming

We present an approach for discrete receive beamforming with the aim of approximately maximizing the signalto-interference-plus-noise ratio. For an antenna array the beamforming weights (amplitude and phase) of all array elements are allowed to vary in a given discrete set. This is of practical importance for amplifiers and phase shifters with a discrete resolution. Adapting the Capon method we introduce a discrete optimization problem that can be efficiently solved by a branchand- bound algorithm. Numerical experiments show the capability of this approach.