Beamforming properties and design of the phased arrays in terms of irregular subarrays

Abstract

Large phased arrays are often organised by subarrays given the current state of technology. The irregular subarray architecture, which can effectively mitigate the quantisation lobes, has received a renewed interest in recent years. Recent researches present some innovative particular irregular subarrays to provide practical means to eliminate the quantisation lobes using several (even only one) kinds of subarray. However, there is no single, neat theory of the irregularly partitioned array antennas in the literature. This study presents some derivations of the beamforming properties for arrays with arbitrary subarray partition to fill this gap. Derivations have led us to introduce a novel approach to assess the radiation properties which is useful for the systematic design of phased arrays. Numerical experiments are carried out to validate the authors' derivations. Additionally, an elaborate example illustrates a design discipline for a limited-field-of-view array with polyominoshaped subarrays.

On the weighting optimisation of the antenna with overlapped subarrays architecture

“…It can also be used in the wide-band and wide-angle scanning application by moving the phased shifters to the element level and arranging time-delay devices at the subarray level. Discussions about the different applications of subarrayed antennas have been given in [11].…”

Synthesis of quasi‐modular circularly polarized 5G base station antenna arrays based on irregular clustering and sequential rotation

“…One way to achieve modularity is to use irregular‐shaped subarray partitioning and tiling. Many different subarray architectures and tiling strategies have been proposed in the literature 18‐23 . Another, and a more straightforward, way to achieve modularity is to enforce a layout symmetry in the beginning of the element position optimization procedure, as proposed in the literature 24 for position‐amplitude controlled arrays.…”

“…Many different subarray architectures and tiling strategies have been proposed in the literature. [18][19][20][21][22][23] Another, and a more straightforward, way to achieve modularity is to enforce a layout symmetry in the beginning of the element position optimization procedure, as proposed in the literature 24 for position-amplitude controlled arrays. A similar strategy is used in this article for position-only optimized arrays for power-efficient 5G antenna systems.…”