Efficient Estimation of Active Element Patterns for 2-D Planar Array Antennas via Directional Decomposition

TL;DR

This paper introduces a directional decomposition method to efficiently estimate active element patterns in large 2-D array antennas, significantly reducing computational time while maintaining high accuracy in beam pattern synthesis.

Contribution

The proposed method reduces computational complexity for active element pattern estimation in large arrays using directional decomposition, enabling faster and accurate beamforming calculations.

Findings

High accuracy in active element pattern estimation with mean squared errors below 0.1dB.

Computational complexity reduced from O(M_B^2 N_x^3 N_y^3) to O(M_B^2 (N_x^3 + N_y^3)).

Analysis time decreased to under 0.095% of conventional methods.

Abstract

The active element pattern method is widely employed in beam pattern synthesis of array antenna to account for mutual coupling between antenna elements. Calculating the active element patterns for large number of array requires full-wave analyses of total array structure, which is time consuming. To obtain accurate active element patterns efficiently, this letter proposes a method to estimates active element patterns in largely arrayed antenna using directional decomposition approach. Reducing computational cost, proposed method constructs the transfer matrices to reflect both mutual coupling and truncation effects between each antenna element. Numerical validation with open-ended waveguides confirms that the proposed method can estimate active element patterns with high accuracy. The synthesized beam patterns show mean squared errors below 0.1dB in the main lobe region for various beam steering cases. The computational complexity for numerical analysis reduces from $\mathcal{O}(M_B^2(N_x^3 N_y^3))$ to $\mathcal{O}(M_B^2(N_x^3 + N_y^3))$, resulting in a reduction of computation time to under 0.095\% compared to the conventional active element pattern method.