NEAR OPTIMAL ROBUST ADAPTIVE BEAMFORMING APPROACH BASED ON EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHM

The presence of desired signal in the training data for sample covariance matrix calculation is known to lead to a substantial performance degradation, especially when the desired signal is the dominant signal in the training data. Together with the uncertainty in the look direction, most of the adaptive beamforming solutions are unable to approach the optimal performance. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary algorithm (EA) based robust adaptive beamforming that is able to achieve near optimal performance. The essence of the idea is to shape the array beam response such that it has maximum response in the desired signal’s angular range and minimum response in the interferences’ angular range. In addition, the approach introduces null-response constraints deduced from the array observation to achieve better interference cancelation performance. As a whole, the proposed optimization is solvable using an improved variant of the differential evolution (DE) algorithm. Numerical simulations are also presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.