Optimal synthesis of reconfigurable planar arrays with simplified architectures for monopulse radar applications

A new approach to the power synthesis of fixed-geometry reconfigurable planar arrays radiating sum and difference patterns is presented. The proposed design technique allows to maximize the radiation performance (field slope, amplitude, or even directivity) of both beam patterns over assigned directions subject to completely arbitrary masks for sidelobe bounds. Whatever the elements disposal and the array boundary, the overall problem is solved through a convex (quadratic) programming procedure. Moreover, if centrosymmetric antenna layouts are adopted, the synthesis is reduced to an even more powerful linear programming routine which preserves the solution uniqueness and optimality guaranteed by quadratic programming codes while dramatically decreasing their computational weight (and hence enabling the design of much larger planar arrays). The proposed approach also takes into account the need of reducing the complexity of the beam forming network (BFN) , which is fulfilled by sharing part of the excitation amplitudes between the two radiation modalities. A set of numerical examples is reported and discussed to show the versatility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.