Array Processing Fundamentals

Signal processing is ubiquitous, ranging from our human body processing light and acoustic radiations to electronic devices, such as cell phones and televisions. The goal of signal processing is to extract as much information as possible from the environment. Generally, the received signal is characterized and processed in two domains, temporal domain and spectral domain, and sometimes in the joint-domain, such as time-frequency analysis. Array signal processing is a prominent and specialized branch of signal processing that processes the signal in the spatial domain. Antenna arrays play an important role in diverse application areas, such as radar, sonar systems and wireless communications [1] to list a few. Such an array consists of a set of N sensors that are spatially distributed at known locations with reference to a common reference point.