Fast acquisition of burst and transient signals using a predictive adaptive beamformer

The author presents a simple prediction algorithm for blindly adapting a narrowband beamformer to rapidly acquire burst or transient signals by exploiting only the abrupt ON/OFF transitions of the transient waveforms, that is without using knowledge of the frequency or DOA (direction of arrival) of the signal of interest or knowledge of the manifold, geometry, or noise covariance of the array. It is shown via analysis and computer simulation that the algorithm is able to detect burst and transient signals, and to capture those signals with maximum attainable output SINR (signal-to-interference and -noise ratio) in environments containing severe stationary cochannel interference. In particular, it is shown that the algorithm can adapt a four-element antenna to blindly detect and capture FSK (frequency shift keying) bursts with 10-20-ms burst durations in less than 2 ms, even at low power levels (~4-dB signal-to-white-noise ratio) and in the presence of strong (~50-dB SIR) stationary interference