Constrained Design of Aperiodic Tiled Phased Arrays for LFoV Antenna Systems

The design of aperiodic tiled array antennas for limited field-of-view (LFoV) applications is addressed. Starting from a finite alphabet of tile shapes, the configuration of the subarrays and their complex (amplitude and phase) weights are optimized to minimize the peak sidelobe level (SLL) of a pencil beam within the LFoV scan region, while fulfilling geometrical constraints on the positions of the tiles to match a predefined topology of the feeding network (FN). In the case of computationally tractable array sizes, the global optimum of the synthesis problem at hand is yielded with an enumerative approach. Otherwise, suboptimal tradeoff tiling of the array aperture are synthesized by means of a customized optimization method based on a smart sampling technique. A set of representative benchmark problems, concerned with LFoV array applications, is described and discussed to assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach.