Far-Field Synthesis of Sparse Arrays with Cross-polar Pattern Reduction

This paper presents a fully deterministic iterative algorithm for the far-field synthesis of antenna arrays with reduction of the cross-polar component. The algorithm synthesizes the excitations as well as the positions of the array elements, providing a sparse geometry. Starting from an initial set of possible positions, the proposed algorithm iteratively solves a sequence of convex optimization problems. At each iteration a suitable objective function is minimized, which allows to reduce the number of radiating elements, among those of the initial set, in presence of constraints on the far-field co-polar and cross-polar patterns. The adopted formulation leads to a second order cone problem (SOCP), which is iteratively solved with CVX, a Matlab-based modeling system developed at the Stanford University and available on the Internet.