Cluster Analysis for the Synthesis of Subarrayed Monopulse Antennas

Abstract

The design of monopulse radar systems requires the synthesis of both a sum pattern and a difference pattern, which is quite flexible and hard to be optimized for subarrayed antennas. In this study, innovative approaches to synthesize the optimal sum and difference patterns independently for subarrayed monopulse arrays are presented. By exploiting the relationship of the subarray partition and optimal excitations, the synthesis problem is formulated as the clustering of a set induced by the optimal excitations. Thus, the optimal subarray partition is transformed to a clustering problem. A clustering method is presented to solve the array synthesis with uniform excitation at element level. Furthermore, an improved approach is proposed to synthesize low sidelobe patterns. When compared with several classical approaches, various numerical experiments validate the effectiveness and potentiality of the proposed methods.