Synthesis of Unequally Spaced Linear Antenna Arrays With Minimum Element Spacing Constraint by Alternating Convex Optimization

A novel method called alternating convex optimization is presented to synthesize unequally spaced linear arrays with minimum element spacing constraint. In this method, the problem of synthesizing an unequally spaced array is formulated as a sequence of alternating convex optimization problems, and the excitation vector and auxiliary weighting vector are alternately chosen as the optimization variables. The minimum spacing constraint for considering the physical element antenna size can be easily imposed in this alternating optimization process. Two examples for synthesizing unequally spaced linear arrays with focused and shaped patterns are provided to validate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method.