Handbook on Array Processing and Sensor Networks

CHAPTER 4

Robustness Issues in Sensor Array Processing

Alex B. Gershman

Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

4.1 INTRODUCTION

In the last four decades, sensor array processing has found numerous applications in radar [1–4], sonar [5–9], microphone arrays [10, 11], wireless communications [12–14], navigation [15, 16], seismology [17–19], radio astronomy [20, 21], biomedicine [22–24], automotive processing [25], and other fields [26–29].

Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation and adaptive beamforming are two important areas of sensor array processing that will be considered in this chapter. The main objective of DOA estimation is to obtain accurate high-resolution estimates of the source DOAs, whereas the primary goal of adaptive beamforming is to detect and estimate the signal-of-interest waveforms in the presence of interference and noise by means of data-adaptive spatial filtering.

Both these areas have a long history of theoretical research and practical applications, and a variety of advanced DOA estimation and adaptive beamforming methods have been proposed in the last four decades; see [30–37] and references therein.

However, most of the existing array processing methods are entirely based on the assumption of the exact knowledge of the array manifold (i.e., the signal propagation model and antenna array parameters). Moreover, some of these methods are additionally ...