Adaptive beamforming with robustness against both finite-sample effects and steering vector mismatches

A novel approach of robust adaptive beamforming (RABF) is presented in this paper, aiming at robustness against both finite-sample effects and steering vector mismatches. It belongs to the class of diagonal loading approaches with the loading level determined based on worst-case performance optimization. The proposed approach, however, is distinguished by two points. (1) It takes finite-sample effects into account and applies worst-case performance optimization to not only the constraints, but also the objective of the constrained quadratic equation, for which it is referred to as joint worst-case RABF (JW-RABF). (2) It suggests a simple closed-form solution to the optimal loading after some approximations, revealing how different factors affect the loading. Compared with many existing methods in this field, the proposed one achieves better robustness in the case of small sample data size as well as steering vector mismatches. Moreover, it is less computationally demanding for presenting a simple closed-form solution to the optimal loading. Numerical examples confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.