Blind calibration of sensor arrays for narrowband signals with asymptotically optimal weighting

We revisit the problem of blind calibration of uniform linear sensors arrays for narrowband signals and set the premises for the derivation of the optimal blind calibration scheme. In particular, instead of taking the direct (rather involved) Maximum Likelihood (ML) approach for joint estimation of all the unknown model parameters, we follow Paulraj and Kailath's classical approach in exploiting the special (Toeplitz) structure of the observed covariance. However, we offer a substantial improvement over Paulraj and Kailath's Least Squares (LS) estimate by using asymptotic approximations in order to obtain simple, (quasi-)linear Weighted LS (WLS) estimates of the sensors' gains and phases offsets with asymptotically optimal weighting. As we show in simulation experiments, our WLS estimates exhibit near-optimal performance, with a considerable improvement (reaching an order of magnitude and more) in the resulting mean squared errors, w.r.t. the corresponding ordinary LS estimates. We also briefly explain how the methodology derived in this work may be utilized in order to obtain (by certain modifications) the asymptotically optimal ML estimates w.r.t. the raw data via a (quasi)-linear WLS estimate.