Statistical analysis of beam-space estimation for direction-of-arrivals

The authors analyze the beam-space performance of the DOA estimation for several subspace processing algorithms in a unified fashion based on a finite amount of measurements. The mean-squared errors (MSE) of the beam-space DOA estimation for these algorithms are expressed; in a single formula using physical parameters like array manifold, beamformer matrix. The important properties of beam-space performance are revealed; for instance, increasing beam-space dimension does not always reduce MSE for all algorithms. Also, the criteria for designing minimum mean-squared error beamformers are discussed