Constant-Beamwidth LCMV Beamformer with Rectangular Arrays

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach utilizing uniform rectangular arrays to design a constant-beamwidth (CB) linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) beamformer, which also improves white noise gain and directivity. By employing a generalization of the convolutional Kronecker product beamforming technique, we decompose a physical array into virtual subarrays, each tailored to achieve a specific desired feature, and we subsequently synthesize the original array’s beamformer. Through simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed approach successfully achieves the desired beamforming characteristics while maintaining favorable levels of white noise gain and directivity. A comparative analysis against existing methods from the literature reveals that the proposed method performs better than the existing methods.

Keywords

• LCMV beamformer
• constant-beamwidth beamforming
• Kronecker product beamformer
• array signal processing
• rectangular sensor arrays