ABSTRACT
Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation and beamforming for electromagnetic (EM) waves are two common objectives of array processing. Early work on DOA estimation and beam forming has been based on scalar sensors, each of which provides measurements of only one component of the electric or magnetic field induced. EM vector sensors are sensitive to both the DOA and polarization information in the incoming waves. The polarization provides a crucial criterion for distinguishing and isolating signals that may otherwise overlap in conventional scalar-sensor arrays. The chapter presents a minimum-noise-variance type beamformer for a single EM vector sensor and also analyses the performance of the beamformer. The investigation of the performance of the beamformer is restricted to scenarios where there exist one signal and one interference that are uncorrelated. The proposed beamformer can be extended easily to handle multiple sources with diverse polarizations using multiple vector sensors as receivers.
