Optimal Beamforming Design for Underwater Acoustic Communication With Multiple Unsteady Sub-Gaussian Interferers

Traditional beamforming (BF) methods can be used to suppress the Gaussian interferers in underwater acoustic communication systems. However, multiple unsteady sub-Gaussian interferers may exist that degrade the performance of BF. In this paper, a new beamformer is proposed for the suppression of multiple unsteady sub-Gaussian interferers (SMUSGI). The proposed BF combines the multiplier and the quasi-Newton methods to obtain the optimal weight vector. Simulation experiments are conducted to validate the performance of the proposed beamformer. In addition, the proposed beamformer is compared with the traditional methods including the MVDR, Subspace, Bartlett, MDDR, LCMD and LCMV beamformers. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed beamformer can effectively suppress multiple unsteady sub-Gaussian interferers with a higher output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), and faster convergence compared with the traditional methods.