Robust Quasi-Adaptive Beamforming Against Direction-of-Arrival Mismatch

This paper presents a novel robust quasi-adaptive beamforming (RQAB) scheme against direction-of-arrival (DOA) mismatch. Unlike existing robust adaptive beamforming (RAB) methods, the proposed approach obtains the ultimate beamformer weight vector in a quiescent manner, nevertheless, it possesses the remarkable ability of interference rejection and desired signal reception. In this method, a two-step procedure is devised to design the quasi-adaptive weight vector. More specifically, the conventional sample matrix inversion (SMI) beamformer is first applied to find out all notch angles outside the region of interest (ROI) where the desired signal comes with a high probability. It is shown that these notch angles contain the DOAs of interferences. Then, a multipoint accurate array response control (MA2RC) algorithm is utilized to synthesize a beampattern with the same sidelobe notch levels as the SMI, and nearly constant response over the ROI. Contrary to conventional approaches that are vulnerable to the contamination of the training data by the desired signal, our proposed approach exhibits outstanding performance under this common scenario. Moreover, besides the DOA mismatch, the proposed approach is also insensitive to the SNR, number of snapshots and mismatch angle. Additionally, different from many optimization-based RAB methods, the proposed RQAB approach offers an analytical expression of the beamformer weight vector and, hence, is computationally attractive. Typical simulation examples are provided to demonstrate the superiority of the RQAB scheme.