Adaptive beamforming for rapidly moving arrays

Abstract

Adaptive beamforming procedures based on linear least squares estimation of a wanted signal have been shown to successfully excise unwanted interference from the beamformer output when the signal environment is stationary. However under non-stationary conditions, such as those experienced by an array mounted on a rapidly moving platform, performance may be significantly degraded. By modelling the dynamic behaviour of the beamforming weights the losses in performance may be recovered. In particular we show that through the estimation of a beamforming weight vector and its rate-of-change, we are able to compensate for the effects of a constant angular rotation of the array.