Beam forming using an iterative bootstrapping technique

In this paper, we describe a novel bootstrapping technique that iteratively improves an initial estimate of a set of unknown complex-valued channel parameters. The initial parameter estimates are inter-related; they are the measurements obtained using several Transceiver Devices (TDs), each of which can estimate only a "local" subset of the full parameter set (i.e., no single TD has a "global" visibility of the parameters). Different initial estimated subsets have some overlap (i.e., each parameter is measured at multiple TDs). The "neighboring" TDs that form the initial estimates of a given parameter are not "calibrated", i.e., each TD introduces an unknown nuisance perturbation common in its estimated subset and different from those for the rest of the TDs. The iterative estimation technique is used to estimate the unknown channel parameters with the above model of their measurements. An application of this technique, i.e., estimation of channel coefficients of a GEO satellite\´s ground-based beam forming array, is described.