Constrained Design of Aperiodic Tiled Phased Arrays for LFoV Antenna Systems

The design of aperiodic tiled array antennas for limited field-of-view (<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">LFoV</i>) applications is addressed. Starting from a finite alphabet of tile shapes, the configuration of the sub-arrays and their complex (amplitude and phase) weights are optimized to minimize the peak sidelobe level of a pencil beam within the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">LFoV</i> scan region, while fulfilling geometrical constraints on the positions of the tiles to match a pre-defined topology of the feeding network (<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">FN</i>). In case of computationally-tractable array sizes, the global optimum of the synthesis problem at hand is yielded with an enumerative approach. Otherwise, sub-optimal trade-off tilings of the array aperture are synthesized by means of a customized optimization method based on a smart sampling technique. A set of representative benchmark problems, concerned with <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">LFoV</i> array applications, is described and discussed to assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach.