A Subspace Approach To Determining Sensor Gain And Phase With Applications To Array Processing

Exact characterization of the array in terms of its geometry and the sensor gain and phase is important in beamforming and directions-of-arrival estimation problems. In practice the sensor gain and phase may not be known exactly due to drift in the sensor characteristics. We present a subspace approach which uses the received array signals to estimate the sensor gain and phase. We assume that the directions-of-arrival of some of the several sources that impinge on the array are known and show how this information can be used to determine sensor parameters. The resulting estimates can then be used to improve the robustness of array processing algorithms both for directions-of-arrival estimation and beamforming. Results of simulations carried out to verify the performance of this method are presented.