Synthesis of multi-beam sub-arrayed antennas through an excitation matching strategy

An innovative synthesis procedure to design sub-arrayed antennas affording multiple patterns is presented in this paper. The approach is based on an excitation matching procedure aimed at generating one optimal pattern and multiple compromises close as much as possible to user-defined reference beams. A suitable modification of the -means clustering algorithm integrated into a customized version of the contiguous partition method is used to efficiently sample the solution space looking for the best compromise excitations. A set of representative numerical results is reported to give some indications on the reliability, potentialities, and limitations of the proposed approach.