Compared to omnidirectional antennas, smart antenna arrays are qualified such advantages as lower interference and better spatial reuse. As developed from large-scale phased array radar, subarray technology is a key approach to reduce the computational complexity, and a quantity of algorithms for subarray partition and low sidelobe has been studied and applied in radar system. With the development of hardware manufacture, portability and mobility are the trend of devices, which limit the array aperture and number of elements, and the performances are constrained by elements number. This paper proposes a dense overlapped subarray architecture for linear array when elements number is small, to improve the array gain and output signal to interference plus noise ratio, and different weighting mode is employed at element and subarray level for adaptive digital beamforming to obtain special performances. The subarray partition is presented for the linear array, which keeps the spacing at subarray level half wavelength to avoid grating lobes and nulls, and the simulation results demonstrate that the subarray architecture induces better output signal to interference plus noise ratio; meanwhile, the computational amount is reduced.in which s 0 .t / is the signal component and s i+n .t / is the interference plus noise component, then the equation earlier is expanded asP j a. j /s j .t / C n.t /where n(t ) is the noise vector composed of the Gaussian noise received in each element.