Towards a self-healing, anti-jamming adaptive beamforming array

Abstract

Fault tolerance is a critical property for many communication systems, whether it is commercial or governmental, related to defense or aerospace, be it terrestrial, airborne or in space. Redundancy is a common approach to fault-tolerance but incurs extra cost, mass, and overall system complexity. Self-healing systems are appealing because they avoid some of the disadvantages of redundancy while allowing the system to recover partial or full functionality. In this paper, we present experimental results showing how an adaptive beamforming system can recover full anti-jamming functionality in the presence of significant antenna damage.