Robust and Efficient Adaptive Beamforming Using Nested Subarray Principles

In this paper, we propose an adaptive beamforming algorithm for large uniform linear arrays (ULAs), where only a nested subarray is utilized to calculate the beamforming coefficients for the original ULA. In this algorithm, the steering vectors and powers of the signal-of-interest (SOI) and interferences are firstly estimated using the Capon spatial spectrum and known array structure, and the interference-plus-noise covariance matrix (INCM) is then constructed. Subsequently, an augmented INCM is formed via vectorization and spatial smoothing operations. Finally, the beamformer weight vector is determined by the augmented INCM and the estimated SOI steering vector. Our proposed algorithm exploits the enhanced degrees of freedom of the nested array, and thus can be applied to a large ULA to reduce the implementation complexity. Moreover, it fundamentally eliminates the SOI component. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs better than the existing approaches.