SINR Analysis of the Subtraction-Based SMI Beamformer

The sample matrix inversion (SMI) beamformer suffers from performance degradation due to the finite sample size effect and the arrival angle mismatch problem. A simple technique to provide robustness to the conventional SMI beamformer is to block the desired signal from the received data before calculating the beamformer´s weight vector, which leads to the subtraction-based SMI (S-SMI) beamformer. In this correspondence, closed-form approximations of the expected value of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for the S-SMI beamformer and the SMI beamformer are derived, where the effect of both finite sample size and arrival angle mismatch are considered. Simulations show that the derived approximations are close enough to represent the true values of the SINR, when the sample size is small and the arrival direction mismatch exists.