Investigations on the synthesis of uniform linear antenna array using biogeography-based optimisation techniques

This paper presents the use of biogeography-based optimisation (BBO) algorithm for uniform linear antenna array (ULA) synthesis using amplitude only control method. BBO is a new evolutionary algorithm (EA) proposed by Dan Simon in the year 2008. The first objective of this paper is to optimise the excitation magnitude of array elements to minimise the maximum side lobe levels. Second objective is to place nulls at specific directions for the optimised pattern by optimising a weight parameter. We review classic BBO and modified biogeography-based optimisation (M-BBO) with two migration models namely linear and sinusoidal. Several simulation experiments are conducted on ULA using BBO techniques to minimise the maximum side lobe level (SLL) imposed with broad nulls. We compare the results of simulation case studies of classic BBO and M-BBO with other EAs such as ACO, GA and StudGA. Best performance is achieved using BBO techniques compared to other EAs for our design problem. The major aim of our investigation is to expose BBO to the EM community and demonstrate its great potential in antenna array design optimisation problem.