A beamforming algorithm for adaptive antennas operating in crowded CDMA signal environment

A novel beamforming algorithm for adaptive antennas operating in a crowded signal code division multiple access environment is presented. The novelty of the algorithm consists in the use of both classical and modern spectral estimation algorithms. In particular, the estimation of the direction of arrival of the desired signal is performed using the signal covariance matrix, while the distribution of the interference signals is obtained by means of the spectrogram. This approach permits satisfactory performances even when the number of signals is much larger than the number of elements of the array.