Nonasymptotic statistical performance of beamforming for deterministic signals

The purpose of this letter is to investigate, in the deterministic case, the nonasymptotic behavior of beamforming estimation of the direction of arrival of a single source impinging on a uniform linear array. We derive an approximate analytical expression of the maximum-likelihood mean-squared error that is valid for all SNR ranges and number of snapshots. Computer simulations confirm the validity of the theoretical investigations.