6.

5 APPLICATION: ANTENNA BEAMFORMING

Consider the diagram of Fig. 6.4, which shows a linear array of sensors or antennas, assumed uniformly spaced,
with the separation between two adjacent elements denoted by

. The antenna array is assumed to be far from a

source radiating an electromagnetic wave of the form

r ( t ) =s ( t ) e
Where

jWct

, j 1

c denotes the carrier frequency and s (t) denotes the envelope, also called the baseband signal.

Since the source is sufficiently distant from the antenna array, the arriving wave fronts can be assumed to be planar
at the array. The output of the array is obtained by linearly combining the measurements at the antennas. These
measurements are subjected to noise with the noise at antenna j at time t denoted by

v j (t)

Let denote the direction of arrival of the wave front relative to the plane of the antennas, as indicated in the figure,
and consider the two leftmost antennas, labelled 0 and 1. The distance that separates the planar waves arriving at
these two elements is equal to

cos .

Moreover, the interval of time At that is needed for the wave to propagate from antenna 1 to antenna 0 is

d cos /c , where c is the speed of propagation or, equivalently,

t=(2 d cos)/(W c )
is the wavelength of the wavefront; it is related to C via
W
c= c
2

Where

if we assume a slowly-varying envelope, i.e., if s ( t+ t ) s ( t ) , then the signal at antenna 1 at

time t is

s (t) e

j Wc t +

2 d cos
Wc

)=s ( t ) e j W t e j 2 dcos
c

More generally, by following a similar argument, the signal arriving at the n-th antenna at time t is of the form

s (t) e

j Wc t

2 n
dcos

, n=0,1,2 , M 1

If at time t we take a snapshot of the values of the signals at the M antenna elements we obtain, from left to right,

s (t) e

j Wc t

[1 e

2
dcos

4
dcos

2 ( M 1 )
dcos

Usually, before processing by the antenna array, the incident signals are first converted to baseband, which means
that the carrier component

j Wc t

is removed. In this way, the signals received by the antennas at time t can be

assumed to be of the form:

s (t) e

2 n
dcos

, n=0,1,2, M 1

The purpose of a beam former is to combine the entries of the snapshot, say, as for

k Y

some column vector k,

in order to achieve two objectives.

1.

Directionality. The vector

must satisfy

k H =1.

This condition guarantees that when the

incident direction of arrival is , the response of the beam former, in the absence of any noise, will be

k Y =s ( t ) k H =s ( t )

2.

Interference attenuation. When the snapshot y is corrupted by additive noise (including the effects of
interferences caused by signals not originating from the direction , we would like the output of the beam
former to provide an estimate of

s ( t ) . For this purpose, we should choose k in order to minimize the

error variance, i.e., by solving

Es ( t )2
min
k

~s ( t )=s ( t )^s ( t )=s ( t ) k Y =s ( t )k [ H s ( t ) +v ( t ) ] =k v

Where
since

k H =1. Therefore, the second requirement on k is to minimize the variance k R v k , where

Rv , is the covariance matrix of v.

The beamforming problem, also known as the linearly-constrained minimum-variance problem, or as the
minimum-variance distortion less-response problem, is then to solve

min k R v k subject k H=1

k

Using remark 6.1:

k 0 =( H R v1 H ) H R v1

The optimal choice for k can be found as

k0 =

H Rv

( H R v1 H )

in this case the beam former output is

s^ ( t )=

H R v1
1

( H R v1 H )

and the resulting m.m.s.e. is

m. m . s . e=

1
H R v1 H

If the noise at the antennas is spatially white, i.e., if the noise at each sensor is uncorrelated with the noises
at the other sensors, and if the variance of all noises is

v ,then Rv = v I . In this case, the

output of the beam former becomes

H Rv

1
s^ ( t )= 1 1 Y =
M
( H Rv H )

M 1

Y n(t )e

2 n
d cos

n=0

Where we have denoted the individual entries of Y

by

Y n ( t ) . This expression shows that, in the

case of white spatial noise, the beam former first aligns the phases of the signals it receives and then
averages them.