Performance analysis of Norm Constrained Capon Beamforming

The performance of the Standard Capon Beamforming (SCB) will become worse than Conventional Beamformer (CBF) in the case of small-sample errors, the steering vector errors and so on. Recently, many robust approaches to overcome the above problems are studied, such as Linearly Constrained Minimum Variance (LCMV), Diagonal Loading (DL) and so on. Among them, Norm Constraint Capon Beamforming (NCCB) is most popular and has a clear physical meaning. In this paper, we transform the original formulation of NCCB into Second Order Cone Programming (SOCP) form, and give a complete performance analysis of NCCB approach. Simulation results show that NCCB is more robust against the steering vector errors, and has a better power estimation of the Signal of Interest (SOI) and output Signal Interference Noise Ratio (SINR).