Combinatorial Design of Low-Degradation Linear Arrays in Interferometric Aperture Synthesis Radiometers

Abstract

Radiometric sensitivity is a crucially important performance metric of interferometric aperture synthesis radiometers (IASRs). When synthesizing array geometries for optimum sensitivity performance, the minimum-degradation or low-degradation arrays (MDAs or LDAs) are employed to fulfill requirements of baseline coverage and redundancy distribution. This paper presents a study on combinatorial design of low-degradation linear arrays (LDLAs), based on a concept of multiple difference basis (MDB). Such a deterministic method can attain a satisfactory radiometric sensitivity performance in short computation time and can be easily applied in large array synthesis, compared with stochastic design methods (e.g., simulated annealing). Furthermore, the resultant LDLAs also have advantages of angular resolution and system reliability to element wreckage. Representative experiments are carried out to demonstrate the significance of the proposed MDB-based technique for designing LDLAs.