Design of Constant Beamwidth Beamforming in Elevation Angle with Concentric Ring Arrays

Beamforming has been at the forefront of research activity for many decades, applied in applications such as hands-free audio communication, hearing aids, and teleconferencing systems. Most applications involve signals that are broadband in nature in a three-dimensional setting. A fundamental limitation of conventional beamforming is the narrowing of beamwidth at higher frequencies, leading to undesired distortion. In this seminar, we propose a hybrid approach to efficiently design a constant elevation-beamwidth beamforming with concentric ring arrays (CRAs). We formulate a convex quadratic programming problem for a given CRA configuration, directly optimizing the beamformer coefficients while maintaining constant elevation-beamwidth over a wide range of frequencies. Subsequently, we propose a hybrid approach to optimize the ring radii with a genetic algorithm exploiting the partial convexity of the problem. Experimental results demonstrate the flexibility and advantages of the proposed approach compared to the state-of-the-art.

M.Sc. student under the supervision of Prof. Israel Cohen.