Antenna Arrays (Phased Arrays)

An antenna array (often called a 'phased array') is a set of 2 or more antennas. The signals from the antennas are combined or processed in order to achieve improved performance over that of a single antenna. The antenna array can be used to: increase the overall gain provide diversity reception cancel out interference from a particular set of directions "steer" the array so that it is most sensitive in a particular direction determine the direction of arrival of the incoming signals to maximize the Signal to Interference Plus Noise Ratio (SINR) To understand antenna arrays and phased arrays, navigate through the following pages:

1. Basic Concepts and Intro to Antenna Arrays

Benefits of Antenna Arrays, Array Factor

2. Weighting Methods Used in Antenna Arrays

Phased Arrays, Schelkunoff (Null Placement) Weighting, Analysis of Uniform Antenna Arrays, Grating Lobes Array Factors for Uniform Arrays, 2D Uniform Phased Arrays, Dolph-Chebyshev Weights, MMSE Weighting, Adaptive Antenna Arrays: LMS Weighting Algorithm

3. Geometry Optimization in Antenna Arrays

Hexagonally Sampled Antenna Arrays, Thinned Antenna Arrays Antenna Array Basics An antenna array is a set of N spatially separated antennas. The number of antennas in an array can be as small as 2, or as large as several thousand (as in the AN/FPS-85 Phased Array Radar Facility operated by U. S. Air Force). In general, the performance of an antenna array (for whatever application it is being used) increases with the number of antennas (elements) in the array; the drawback of course is the increased cost, size, and complexity. The following figures show some examples of antenna arrays.

Figure 1. Four-element microstrip antenna array (phased array).

Figure 2. Cell-tower Antenna Array. These Antenna Arrays are typically used in groups of 3 (2 receive antennas and 1 transmit antenna). The general form of an antenna array can be illustrated as in Figure 3. An origin and coordinate system are selected, and then the N elements are positioned, each at location given by:

The positions of the elements in the phased array are illustrated in the following Figure.

Figure 3. Geometry of an arbitrary N element antenna array. Let represent the output from antennas 1 thru N, respectively. The output from these antennas are most often multiplied by a set of N weights - and added together as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Weighting and summing of signals from the antennas to form the output in a Phased Array. The output of an antenna array can be written succinctly as:

This is what is going on in an antenna array. However, I haven't answered what the benefits of a phased array are. To understand what happens in an antenna array, navigate to the next section on Antenna Arrays. Benefits of Antenna Arrays To understand the benefits of antenna arrays, we will consider a set of 3-antennas located along the z-axis, receiving a signal (plane wave or the desired information) arriving from an angle relative to the z-axis of , as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Example 3-element Antenna Array receiving a plane wave. The antennas in the phased array are spaced one-half wavelength apart (centered at z=0). The Efield of the plane wave (assumed to have a constant amplitude everywhere) can be written as:

In the above, k is the wave vector, which specifies the variation of the phase as a function of position. The (x,y) coordinates of each antenna is (0,0); only the z-coordinate changes for each antenna. Further, assuming that the antennas are isotropic sensors, the signal received from each antenna is proportional to the E-field at the antenna location. Hence, for antenna i, the received signal is:

The received signals are distinct by a complex phase factor, which depends on the antenna separations and the angle of arrival on the plane wave. If the signals are summed together, the result is:

The interesting thing is if the magnitude of Y is plotted versus wave). The result is given in Figure 5.

(the angle of arrival of the plane

Figure 5. Magnitude of the output as a function of the arrival angle for Antenna Array. Figure 5 shows that the phased array actually processes the signals better in some directions than others. For instance, the antenna array is most receptive when the angle of arrival is 90 degrees. In contrast, when the angle of arrival is 45 or 135 degrees, the antenna array has zero output power, no matter how much power is in the incident plane wave. In this manner, a directional radiation pattern is obtained even though the antennas were assumed to be isotropic. Even though this was shown for receiving antennas, due to reciprocity, the transmitting properties would be the same.

The value and utility of an antenna array lies in its ability to determine (or alter) the received or transmitted power as a function of the arrival angle.
By choosing the weights and geometry of an antenna array properly, the phased array can be designed to cancel out energy from undesirable directions and receive energy most sensitively from other directions. Before considering weight and geometry selection, we first turn to the fundamental function of antenna array theory, the Array Factor.

NULL PLACING

Schelkunoff Polynomial Method

Weighting Methods Antenna Theory (Home) Antenna Arrays (Main) Instead of steering an antenna array (in which case we want to receive or transmit primarily in a particularly direction), suppose instead we want to ensure that a minimum of energy goes in particular directions. The weights of an antenna array can be selected such that the radiation pattern has nulls (0 energy transmitted or received) in particular directions. In this manner, undesirable directions of interference, jamming signals, or noise can be reduced or completely eliminated. It turns out that this isn't real hard to do, either. In general, an N element array can place N-1 independent nulls in its radiation pattern. This just requires a little math to work through, and will be illustrated via an example. Let's assume we have an N element linear array with uniform spacing equal to a half-wavelength and lying on the z-axis. To start, the array factor of a uniformly spaced linear array with half-wavelength spacing can be rewritten using a variable substitution as:

The above equation is simply a polynomial in the (complex) variable z. Recall that a polynomial of order N has N zeros (which may be complex). The polynomial for the AF above is of order N-1 zeros. If the zeros are numbered starting from zero, the zeros will be 0, 1, ..., N-2. The AF is rewritten then as:

We've introduced variables, and have gotten rid of the weights. Hence, we can choose the zeros to be whatever we want, and then figure out what the weights should be to give us the same pattern. To make the example concrete, let N=3. Suppose we want the array's radiation pattern to have zeros at 45 and 120 degrees. We can simply use the equation for z above, and substitute these values for the angle. We then obtain the corresponding zeros, . The z values corresponding to the zeros are:

For simplicity, we'll let

. The AF then becomes:

This AF must equal the original AF, so:

The weights then can be easily found to be:

We already know what the are, so we automatically have the weights. Using these weights to plot the magnitude of the array factor, we obtain the result in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Magnitude of array factor.

Observe that the radiation pattern has zeros at 45 and 120 degrees, exactly as we specified. This method can be used for whatever directions you want; however if N-1 nulls are selected for an N element array, the designer no longer has control over where the maximum of the radiation pattern is. This method can easily be performed on linear arrays with many more elements. This method can be The Schelkunoff Polynomial Method easily extends to planar and multi-dimensional arrays. The simplicity of placing nulls in the radiation pattern adds a powerful advantage for using arrays in practice.

Thinner antenna array (tapering decreasing grating lobes)

One of the earliest methods of optimizing array geometry dates back to around 1960 and is known as "thinning arrays" or "array thinning". This method is relatively simple. A large uniformly spaced array (linear or planar) is used as a starting point. Large arrays are complex to build, have increased fabrication and setup costs, are heavier, etc; therefore, eliminating antenna elements from the array would be desirable, particularly if the array's performance is not significantly degraded. One method of achieving this goal is array thinning - systematically removing elements without a large degradation in performance. The elements can then be perturbed from their locations if necessary. To illustrate the utility of this method, a simple example will be presented. Consider a 20-element uniformly spaced linear array (with half-wavelength spacing), with positions given by:

To illustrate the concept of thinned arrays, lets remove some of the elements and perturb the locations a little, we have a 12 element linear array with positions given by:

Note that both arrays have approximately the same length. Assume that all the weights for the array are constant and set to one. The resulting Array Factors for both arrays are plotted in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Magnitude of Array Factor (dB) for Uniform 20-element array and thinned 12-element array. Some observations are immediattely apparent after observing Figure 1. First, the peak gain of the Array Factor decreased for the thinned array. This is because less elements make up the array; hence this result will always hold for thinned arrays. Second, the Sidelobe Level and beamwidth are approximately the same for the two cases, except for large angular separation from the main beam. Hence, the performance of the full uniform array can be approximately achieved using 40% fewer elements, which is often highly desirable.

Side Note: The large sidelobes in the thinned array are easily eliminated. Recall that what is actually radiated by an antenna array is the product (pattern multiplication) of the Array Factor and the radiation pattern of the antennas that make up the array. Hence, by choosing an antenna that has low gain for small and large values of the polar angle theta (such as a simple dipole antenna, these sidelobes are instantly removed.

In previous example, I just removed some of the antenna elements and twiddled the spacing by hand to get something I liked. More general methods of array thinning are listed below. Thinning Based on an Empirical or Analytical Formula: Array thinning can be performed by using a set rule, which is advantageous because it requires no computation. For instance, array

spacing can be designed to follow the prime number sequence, which leads to non-uniform and sparse spacing:

Thinning based on space or density tapering: A successful method of lowering sidelobes in arrays is to decrease the magnitude of the weights away from the center of the array. This tapering is similar to "windowing" in digital signal processing. Having a uniform weight set across the array leads to higher sidelobes than when the weights taper down, in general. The density tapering approach uses uniform weights for all antennas; however, it removes antenna elements away from the center, in effect having less energy radiated away from the center of the array, which accomplishes the same effect as state above. Statistically thinned arrays: For very large arrays, a statistical method is often used for array tapering. In this approach, the probability for an element to lie in a particular position is proportional to the desired weighting for a weight-tapered array. For arrays with a large number of elements, this approach yields arrays that behave properly and have low sidelobes. Optimizing Algorithms: Finally, since computers are so computationally fast these days, thinning and placement optimization is often done via optimization algorithms. Examples include Genetic Algorithms (GA), the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm, and Simulated Annealing (SA). All of these methods employ some statistical optimization approach that guesses at the proper elements to remove, then removes them if this increases the performance of the array. This has been popular in the antenna literature over the past 15 years, primariliy because it is simple to implement and can achieve interesting results.