Beamforming With Uncertain Weights

In this letter, we show that worst-case robust beamforming, with uncertain weights subject to multiplicative variations, can be cast as a convex optimization problem. We interpret this problem as a weighted complex l₁-regularization of the nominal beamforming problem, and show that it can be solved with the same computational complexity as nominal beamforming, ignoring the variations. We derive a simple lower bound on how much worse the robust beamformer will be compared to the nominal beamformer solution with no weight uncertainty. We demonstrate the robust approach with a simple narrowband beamformer