Adaptive Beamforming for Slow Fading Rayleigh Signals

In this paper we develop an adaptive beamsummer for direction of arrival (DOA) estimation of slow fading Raleigh signals, using a new design approach, termed "Adaptive Detection/Estimation for specific Tasks" (ADEPT). For DOA estimation, the ADEPT method yields a weight adaptation criterion which is optimized for those weights that minimize the Cramer-Rao (CR) lower bound on achievable mean-square-error of any unbiased DOA estimator constructed on the beamsummer outputs. Simulation results are provided which show that the ADEPT DOA beamsummer yields DOA estimates whose meansquared error (MSE) approaches that of the more complex maximum likelihood implementation.