Quantum-inspired sidelobe canceller beamformer with bidirectional beam scanning and sectorized jamming mitigation properties

Abstract The proposed research aims to develop an efficient sidelobe canceller beamforming antenna array for scanning and anti-jamming purposes in radars with time-modulation. Time-modulated antennas are unconventional alternatives to phased arrays, in which the phase deviations between the impinging signals can be controlled by suitably switching ON and OFF the array elements at different time instants. This research addresses the design of a quantum-inspired optimal time-modulated beamformer, aiming for a broad scan coverage of 90° towards broadside. The scanned beams are generated using quantum algorithm-inspired time schemes, in which the ON times of each element are optimized to achieve the optimal radiation characteristics. The beamformer simultaneously aimed to suppress the sidelobes of the scanned radiation patterns. The proposed beamformer is designed for an 8-element antenna array, and the incorporation of time-modulation and its inherent harmonics generation enables simultaneous beam scanning over a desired region. The scanned patterns with reduced sidelobes are further exploited for the strategic null placement by proposing the time-modulated single-point anti-jammers. The concept is further extended, and an 8-element beamformer is developed for sectorized anti-jamming to show the efficiency, effectiveness, and robustness of the proposed research. Multiple sectors in the angular region are targeted by exploiting the harmonics and suppressing them below a desired level. The sidelobe canceller beamformer also demonstrates decent performance, suppressing sidelobes below 20 dB across all applications. The radiation power efficiency of the beamformer is more than 78%. The proposed sidelobe canceller time-modulated beamformer is also compared with other related research for a detailed comparison.