Unconventional Array Design in the Autocorrelation Domain -- Isophoric 1D Thinning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel autocorrelation-domain approach for designing thinned isophoric antenna arrays, improving efficiency and accuracy over traditional pattern-domain methods by leveraging autocorrelation invariance and hybrid optimization.

Contribution

It presents a new autocorrelation-based formulation for TIA synthesis, reducing solution space complexity and demonstrating advantages through numerical examples and comparisons.

Findings

Autocorrelation-domain approach effectively reduces solution space.

Hybrid optimization efficiently synthesizes array patterns.

AD-based methods outperform traditional pattern-domain techniques.

Abstract

The synthesis of thinned isophoric arrays (TIAs) radiating mask-constrained patterns is addressed. By leveraging on the recently-introduced formulation of the design of antenna arrays in the autocorrelation-domain (AD), the TIA synthesis is recast as the matching of a target autocorrelation function derived from the user-defined guidelines and objectives. By exploiting the autocorrelation invariance of cyclic binary sequences, the AD solution space is significantly reduced and it is efficiently sampled by means of a discrete hybrid optimization approach. Two possible implementations of the AD-based TIA formulation are discussed and assessed in a set of representative numerical examples concerned with both ideal and real radiators, which are full-wave modeled to account for the mutual coupling effects. Comparisons with traditional pattern-domain (PD) synthesis methods are also considered to point out the features and the advantages of AD-based approaches.