Hybrid differential evolution with artificial bee colony and its application for design of a reconfigurable antenna array with discrete phase shifters

Abstract

This study proposes a new method of designing a reconfigurable antenna with quantised phase excitations using a new hybrid algorithm, called as differential evolution algorithm (DE)/artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC). The main objective of the reconfigurable design problem is to find the element excitation that will result in a sector pattern main beam with low side lobes. The same excitation amplitudes applying to the array with zero phase should be in a high directivity and low side lobe pencil-shaped main beam. The dynamic range ratio is minimised to reduce the effect of mutual coupling between the antenna-array elements. Additionally, compared with the continuous realisation and subsequent quantisation, experimental results indicate that the performance of the discrete realisation of the phase-excitation value can be improved. In order to test the performances of hybrid differential evolution with the artificial bee colony algorithm, the results of some state-of-the-art algorithms are considered. The experimental results indicate the better performance of the DE/ABC.