Performance analysis of the minimum variance beamformer
We present an analysis of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the output of the minimum variance beamformer. The analysis is based on the assumption that the signals and noise are Gaussian and that the number of samples is large compared to the array size, and it yields an explicit expression for the SINR in terms of the different parameters affecting the performance, including signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), interference-to-noise ratio (INR), signal-to-interference ratio (SIR), angular separation between the desired signal and the interference, array size and shape, correlation between the desired signal and the interference, and finite sample size.