Robust adaptive beamforming against large steering vector mismatch based on minimum dispersion

Many efforts have been recently devoted to adaptive beamformers based on the minimum dispersion (MD) criterion for non-Gaussian signals, which results in improved signal-to-noise ratio performance. However, large steering vector mismatch and inappropriate choice of uncertainty set will cause performance degradation to the existing MD-based methods. To address these issues, we develop a robust MD-based beamformer against large steering vector mismatch, which utilizes multiple small uncertainty sets to cover the whole uncertainty region. The ℓp−norm (p≥1) minimization problem turns to be nonlinear and nonconvex because of these multi-uncertainty-set constraints. To solve the problem, a projected gradient algorithm is utilized to transform the original problem into a nonconvex quadratically constrained quadratic programming (QCQP) problem. The semidefinite programming relaxation technique is then employed in each iteration to deal with the nonconvex QCQP problem. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed beamformer offers a significant performance improvement in case of large steering vector mismatch for non-Gaussian signals compared with the conventional schemes.