DESIGN OF PATTERN RECONFIGURABLE SPARSE ANTENNA ARRAYS

This paper presents a fully deterministic approach for the design of phase-controlled, reconfigurable, sparse antenna arrays. The objective is that of synthesizing a sparse array which radiates, by phase-only control, a number of desired far-field co-polar patterns, simultaneously controlling the cross-polar patterns and the dynamic range ratio (DRR) of the excitations. The proposed procedure, which optimizes the number, the positions and the excitations of the array elements, is divided in two steps. First, the geometrical synthesis is performed in order to obtain the number and the positions of the array elements. Then, the excitations of these elements are determined with a suitable fixed-grid synthesis algorithm. The optimality of the solution is not guaranteed, but numerical examples provided satisfactory results.