A New Meta-Paradigm for the Synthesis of Antenna Arrays for Future Wireless Communications

An innovative meta-paradigm is introduced to design unconventional capacity-driven antenna architectures for future multiuser communications. Toward this end, the problem of synthesizing the array layout and the excitations of the radiating elements is formulated in terms of the maximization of the communication quality depending on the actual Green’s function of the whole propagation scenario, including the antenna systems, instead of considering standard free-space conditions and related performance indexes. More specifically, a time-domain model of the electromagnetic environment is exploited to derive the expression of the link quality measure. The customization of the proposed meta-paradigm to two relevant and representative excitation-only synthesis problems, concerned with fully populated and contiguously clustered arrangements, is then presented. Some results from an exhaustive numerical validation are reported to illustrate features, potentialities, and limitations of the proposed approach also in comparison with the standard “free-space”-oriented methodology for array design.