Sparse Array Receiver Beamformer Design for Multi-Functional Antenna

Planning sensor locations can potentially economize the receiver cost by minimizing the hardware and computational needs, while satisfying a predetermined design criterion. In this paper, we consider a sparse array receive beamformer design approach for Multi-Functional Antennas (MFA), operating in different frequency bands. In this approach, antenna positions are selected from uniformly spaced locations that are served by a limited number of transceiver chains. The design objective is to maximize the beamformer output Signal-to-Interference-plus-noise-ratio (MaxSINR) for desired sources with disjoint frequency bands operating in a wideband jamming environment. The problem is solved efficiently through alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and simplified to parallel quadratically constraint quadratic programs (QCQP) with a single associated constraint. The re-weighted group sparsity is adopted to ensure a common sparse configuration across all frequency bands. The efficacy of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated with the help of a design example.