Design of an efficient wideband beamformer using OPSO

Abstract

Wideband beamforming is a technique which is used to produce frequency invariant beampatterns over a wide signal bandwidth. In this paper, orthogonal particle swarm optimization (OPSO) based wideband beamformer is designed to achieve wideband beamforming. Simulations are carried out for two different scenarios to illustrate the capability of the algorithm for wideband beamforming. The beampatterns obtained from three different methods that are standard Frost algorithm, particle swarm optimization (PSO) and OPSO are compared by various parameters such as level of interference, deviation in interference angle and peak side lobe level. It is shown that by using OPSO, SLL (Sidelobe Level), null depth as well as angle deviation in nulls direction can be reduced as compared to PSO and Frost algorithms.