Sample support requirements for nonlinear adaptive beamforming

In theory, nonlinear adaptive beamforming techniques which form an extended virtual array from a sparsely populated physical array offer significantly enhanced adaptive degrees of freedom towards mitigating environmental interference as opposed to conventional linear beamformers. A neglected practical issue however, central to the implementation of nonlinear beamformers in radar, is an accurate determination of the data support necessary for computing the adaptive weights and the adapted array output. This paper investigates the data support requirements for a new nonlinear beamformer operating on the streaming output of a multichannel array. The array exists within a quasi-stationary or slowly varying environment where more interference sources are present than array elements.