Separation and bearing estimation of co-channel signals

The authors describe a technique for simultaneously estimating the bearing of and separating (copying) multiple cochannel signals received by a multielement antenna array. The method uses a combination of adaptive beamformers and signal cancelers to sequentially lock onto and remove emitters one by one from the element signals. Inherent to the technique is the generation of a direction vector for each of the isolated emitters. The technique requires neither prior knowledge of emitter bearings nor array calibration is required only to map direction vectors into bearing estimates. The technique is computationally simple and easily amenable to hardware implementation. For reasonably narrowband signals (<50 kHz), the method is simple enough to make real-time implementation using programmable digital signal processing hardware possible. Computer simulations are presented to demonstrate the technique´s operation and robustness