An adaptive wideband beamformer using Kalman filter with spatial signal processing characteristics

This paper presents a novel adaptive wideband beamformer for smart antennas capable of effectively steering the main beam to a desired direction, and place nulls to the interfering signals direction in presence of noise. The proposed beamformer uses a fully spatial signal processing configuration, in which a two-dimensional antenna array acts as a spatial filter, therefore the signals received by each element are processed with only weighting schemes, avoiding tape-delay line networks and frequency filters. To obtain the adaptive weights a Kalman filter is applied. Additionally, the algorithm is able to avoid the self-nulling phenomenon, which occurs when there is a mismatch between the desired signal steering vector and the actual steering vector. The simulation results illustrate the satisfactory performance of the proposed wideband spatial beamformer.