Capability of minimum variance beamformer for direction finding for fast perturbations of array sensors

Direction-of-arrival estimation using the minimum variance beamforming requires exact characterisation of the array in terms of its geometry and sensor gain and phase. In practice, however, the sensor gain and phase differ from nominal due measurement errors and sensor misplacement. Moreover, these errors can are changed in the time. We analyze the potential capability obtained with minimum variance beamformer algorithm in presence fast sensor gain and phase perturbations. The analytical expression for angular separation as a function of the intensity of the errors, signal power and the parameters of the adaptive processor is derived. An adaptive scheme is proposed, which uses phase compensation for random motion; the characteristics are considered