Enhanced Time-Modulated Arrays for Harmonic Beamforming

One of the primary features of time-modulated arrays (TMAs) is their ability to adapt their harmonic patterns to exploit the angular diversity of multipath wireless channels. In such a case, the TMA excitations must provide an adequate level of harmonic windowing in order to safeguard both the antenna efficiency and the signal-to-noise ratio at reception. In this work, we propose to time-modulate the array excitations with periodic sum-of-weighted-cosine (SWC) pulses rather than with the periodic rectangular pulses corresponding to the ON-OFF switches of conventional TMAs. We show that how the larger flexibility of the SWC pulses allows for a more versatile design of the TMA harmonic radiation patterns without penalizing the array gain for each exploited harmonic.