A distributed approach to robust minimum variance distortionless response beamforming in large-scale arrays

Robust beamforming is a commonly-used solution to various array processing problems. Recently, with the inevitable and rapid increasing of array size, the complexity issue arising from high-dimension matrix computations has become an urgent concern in algorithm design. In this paper, an efficient distributed robust beamforming algorithm is developed for large-scale arrays. Specifically, the problem of robust minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamforming with sidelobe level control is considered. By fitting the worst-case reformulation of robust MVDR beamforming into the framework of alternating direction method of multipliers, the problem can be iteratively solved in a distributed manner, with each iteration being computed in closed form. Numerical results demonstrate that this design is more efficient than many related approaches.