Adaptive beamspace focusing for direction of arrival estimation of wideband signals

In this paper, we present an adaptive beamspace focusing technique for the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation of wideband signals. The proposed focusing scheme can perform coherent signal subspace transformation in the beamspace domain without preliminary DOA estimation or iteration. It can maintain low focusing error over a predefined sector-of-interest in the field-of-view (FOV) of the array while adaptively suppressing out-of-sector sources. The beamspace gain outside the sector-of-interest is controlled via additional constraints that provide robustness against moving or suddenly appearing out-of-sector sources. We formulate the adaptive beamspace design problem as a second-order cone program (SOCP) that can be solved efficiently using interior point methods. Numerical simulations are presented showing the superior performance of our approach compared to classical non-adaptive beamspace focusing techniques. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.