Large Direction-of-Arrival Mismatch Correction for Adaptive Beamforming

Abstract

Direction-of-arrival (DOA) mismatch can degrade the performance of adaptive beamforming algorithms. Thus, a projection method is proposed to correct this mismatch. In a beamforming algorithm, the DOA error is usually regarded as a steering vector error which is corrected using a steering vector optimization algorithm. This approach can provide an optimal steering vector but ignores the actual DOA estimate. The proposed algorithm provides correction after DOA estimation but before beamforming to improve both the DOA estimation accuracy and beamforming gain. First, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the signal is estimated and used to regularize the covariance matrix. Then, an estimated steering vector with DOA close to the true value is determined based on a minimum number of projections. Numerical results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method for DOA estimation correction. In most cases, this method improves the performance of the beamforming algorithms without changing them.