An Efficient Method to Determine the Diagonal Loading Factor Using the Constant Modulus Feature

The diagonal loading method is a simple and efficient method that improves the robustness of beamformers. However, determining an ideal diagonal loading factor (DLF) is not a trivial problem, one that still has not been adequately addressed. Although beamformers are widely used in radar, sonar, and many other applications, in this correspondence, we consider a beamformer used only for digital communication applications. In digital communications, user information is coded into a sequence with the constant modulus (CM) in the baseband. Obviously, if the beamformer can cancel interference sufficiently well, the outputs of the beamformer should satisfy the CM condition more precisely. Therefore, minimizing CM errors can act as a natural criterion for determining DLFs. In this correspondence, we present a cost function based on the criterion. We also propose a direct search algorithm for DLF determination by minimizing the cost function. Numerical experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed method.