On the performance of deterministic beamformers: A trade-off between array gain and attenuation

It is customary to look over deterministic beamforming techniques as designs that offer a trade-off between mainlobe width and sidelobe level. In this work, we take into consideration that noise reduction and interference rejection are actually more useful metrics for the design of practical systems, and we present a novel analysis as a first step to understand the behavior and limitations of the deterministic beamformers from this system level perspective. The obtained results show that a trade-off between both metrics exists, and they illustrate some misconceptions about the traditionally assumed optimal designs. Finally, a method to approximately calculate the best attainable performance of any deterministic beamformer is presented. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.