An Analysis of Metaheuristic Algorithms Used for the Recovery of a Failed Antenna Element in an Antenna Array

Abstract

A ground-based synthetic aperture radar system (GB-SAR) comprising of 12 horn antennas in its transmitter section and 12 Vivaldi antennas in its receiver section is used for the monitoring of the Tessina landslide in Italy and the sinking of the Costa Concordia ship in Italy. Alternate 2×6 geometry of 12 coaxial cavity horn antennas have been proven to yield a higher half-power beamwidth and low peak sidelobe ratio resulting in a better quality of the image captured. This 2×6 planar array, when fed with power according to the Dolph Chebyshev weighting polynomial, removes side lobes entirely and results in an increase half-power beamwidth (HPBW) value. A failure of any single element in the 2×6 array could lead to the alteration of the radiation pattern thereby jeopardizing the monitoring activity. This paper explores the usage of metaheuristic algorithms in order to recover the weight of the principal antenna element of the 2×6 coaxial cavity horn antenna array. The algorithms explored are Gradient Descent, Simulated Annealing, Firefly algorithm, Bat algorithm, Flower Pollination algorithm, Cuckoo search algorithm, and Harmony Search algorithm. Among these ones, the Firefly algorithm performs the best in finding the weight of the failed antenna element of the 2×6 planar array.