Adaptive beamforming to overcome coherent interferences and steering errors

A sequentially and linearly constrained minimum variance beamformer (SLCMV), based on a split polarity transformation (SPT) and, called an SPT-SLCMV beamformer, is proposed to minimize the degree of freedom loss, steering error, and a desired signal elimination phenomenon under coherent interferences. The SPT-SLCMV beamformer reduces the degree of freedom loss, which is inevitable in the conventional SPT-LCMV beamformer, by successively applying sub-constraint matrices. Sub-constraint matrices are derived from a complete constraint matrix to remove the correlation between the desired signal and interferences. In addition, the SPT-SLCMV beamformer is combined with the iterative steering error correction method to reduce the steering error between the look direction of the beamformer and the incident angle of the desired signal. As a result, the proposed beamformer reduces the number of array elements while maintaining the performance of an exactly steered SPT-LCMV beamformer having sufficient array elements under coherent interferences.