A New Family of Window Functions Based on Partially Tapered Arrays

Conventional standard tapered window functions have been effectively employed in various areas including signal processing and communication applications. Each of these conventional tapered windows has its own advantages and disadvantages regarding efficiency, practical implementation, and far-field radiation performances in terms of directivity, sidelobe level, and half power beam width. This paper first presents a concise overview of several standard window functions, highlighting their main radiation characteristics and design parameters. Then, a new family of window functions called partially tapered windows for antenna array beamforming applications is proposed. The proposed partially tapered windows use only a subset of all the element excitations to control the array radiation pattern characteristics. The central array elements have amplitudes of ones and phases of zeros, while the side element excitations are tapered according to an original used window function. It is found that the proposed tapered arrays are capable to achieve better radiation characteristics than those of the conventional standard windows. Simulation results are presented to validate the proposed tapered arrays.