A Beamformer for Antenna Arrays with Faulty Elements

An array often has faulty elements in real operation. The faulty elements, producing no output or highly reduced gain than other normal elements, cause an elevated sidelobe level and fail to reject the interference signals in an adaptive beamformer. In this paper we have presented the beamforming algorithm for arrays with faulty elements. In the ideal case, an autocorrelation matrix computed from array output data is the toeplitz. However, the inverse of the autocorrelation matrix computed from array with faulty elements can not be obtained due to deficient values of matrix. To overcome this problem, an adaptive beamforming algorithm using the average values of the diagonal terms of matrix is proposed. The computer simulations have been performed to study the performance of the presented method. We have been able to solve the degrees-of-freedom problem that is the drawback of the previous subaperture processing technique.