Blind Beamforming for Conformal Arrays

Blind beamforming methods are employed when the geometry of the array and the positions of its antennas are unknown. The existing blind beamforming methods can only tackle with linear and planar arrays. Such methods cannot be simply extended to conformal arrays. In this letter, a novel method for blind beamforming for an arbitrarily shaped conformal array is proposed. By calculating the singular value decomposition (SVD) of the cumulant matrix of the received data, the manifold matrix of the array is first extracted. This matrix determines the direction of the sources and is employed in the linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) formulation to obtain the beamforming weights. The individual pattern of each antenna is also incorporated into the LCMV formulation. Our simulation results show that the proposed method can be greatly employed in conformal array blind beamforming and locate directional sources solely based on the received data.