Spatially interpolated beamforming using discrete prolate spheroidal sequences

This paper presents a novel design method for a spatially interpolated beamformer. By separating the design of the physical antenna array and the digital signal processors, we remove the restriction on the half-wavelength spacing requirement of a uniform linear array to achieve higher efficiency. To be more realistic, however, we fix the element positions regardless of the steering angles. The maximum energy concentration properties of discrete prolate spheroidal sequences are exploited to optimize the weighting coefficients and filtering window. Two examples are given to demonstrate the high flexibility, low computational complexity, and non compromised performance of the proposed beamformer.