Sparse Adaptive Beamformer Design with a Good Quiescent Beampattern

The performance of a spatial filter is determined by two factors: hard components of array configurations and software components of weight coefficients. A sparse adaptive beamformer which maximizes the output signal-to-noise ratio (SINR) with a well-controlled quiescent pattern is preferred in diverse applications, such as radar target detection and automatic vehicles. In this paper, we propose a two-step design method, where the sparse array configuration is determined in the first step in terms of the metric of good quiescent pattern and the weight coefficient vector is computed in the second step based on the designed sparse array for maximizing the output SINR with acceptable degradation of beampattern violation from the desired quiescent pattern. Numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.