A Heuristic Approach to Design Linear and Circular Antenna Array for Side Lobe Reduction

This paper presents a heuristic approach-based design of a symmetric linear antenna array (LAA) and a non-uniformly excited single-ring circular antenna array (CAA) to improve the far-field radiation characteristics. The far-field radiation pattern improves with lower side lobe level (SLL) which is essential for the reduction in interference in the entire side lobe regions. A recently proposed evolutionary algorithm called social spider algorithm (SSA) is applied to determine the optimum sets of current excitation weights and the inter-element spacing among the array elements to reduce the SLL. In this context, 10-element and 16-element LAA and 8-element, 10-element and 12-element CAA design examples are presented by optimizing the array parameters. The simulation results obtained by using SSA-based approach confirm a considerable improvement in SLL and some restricted improvement in half-power beam width with respect to the uniform array pattern and those of the recently reported literature.