In a multipath environment

spatially smoothing processing is an effective approach to eliminating the deleterious effect of coherent interference on adaptive array systems.We note that the optimal weights are often obtained with respect to subarrays. This fact implies that there are extra adaptive degrees of freedom to be used to improve the performance of spatially smoothing adaptive arrays. A new technique is formulated in this paper for incorporating unused degrees of freedom into the adaptive array response.We show how to optimize a spatially smoothing adaptive array such that the white noise power in the array output

or the sidelobe levels of the adaptive array beam pattern are reduced. Numerical results illustrate the utility of the new technique.