Performance analysis of biologically inspired coupled circular antenna array

Abstract

We propose to design a small-size circular antenna array inspired by the female Ormia ochracea's coupled ears and demonstrate its high direction of arrival (DOA) estimation performance. The female Ormia is able to locate male crickets' calls accurately, for reproduction purposes, despite the small distance between its ears compared with the incoming wave-length. This phenomenon has been explained by the mechanical coupling between the Ormia's ears, modeled by a pair of differential equations. In this paper, we first solve the differential equations governing the Ormia ochracea's ear response, and convert the response to the pre-specified radio frequencies. Using the converted response, we implement the biologically inspired coupling as a multi-input multi-output filter on a uniform circular antenna array output, and compute the mean-square angular error bound on the 3-D localization accuracy. With numerical examples we demonstrate the advantages of the coupling effect.