Wideband Beamforming for Multipath Signals Based on Frequency Invariant Transformation

It is well known that the performance of conventional adaptive beamformers degrades severely due to the presence of coherent or correlated interferences (multipath propagation) and various techniques have been developed to improve the performance of the beamformer. However, most of the work in the past has been focused on the narrowband case. In this paper, the wideband beamforming problem in the presence of multipath signals is addressed, with a novel approach proposed by employing a pre-processing stage based on the frequency invariant beamforming (FIB) technique. In this approach, the received wideband array signals are first processed by an FIB network, and then a traditional narrowband adaptive beamformer or an appropriate instantaneous blind source separation (BSS) algorithm can be applied to the network outputs. It is shown that with the proposed structure, cancellation of the desired signal is reduced, leading to a significantly improved output signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR).