A novel adaptive beamforming technique for large-scale arrays

In the implementation of an adaptive digital beam-forming system with a large number of antennas, the same number of analogue to digital converters would be required, which could be very expensive. We propose an adaptive beam-forming method for large-scale arrays, which can significantly reduce the cost. In our method, we select a small number of antennas following some specific geometry, for example the nested geometry, to form a sparse subarray. Only the selected antennas in the subarray are with digital circuits. Then we calculate the optimum beamforming coefficients for the original large array by using only the digital data from the selected subarray, and these coefficients are finally applied to the large array for effective analogue beamforming. Simulation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.