Synthesis of Wideband Thinned Eisenstein Fractile Antenna Arrays With Adaptive Beamforming Capability and Reduced Side-Lobes

Abstract

A modern design of fractal antenna arrays, called fractile array, which exhibits a fractal boundary contour within a tiled plane, is explored for enhanced array performance. In this paper, the Eisenstein fractile array is introduced to exploit the unique geometrical features of fractiles that allow multiband and wideband operation and avoid grating lobes in the radiation pattern even, in some cases, when the array elements’ spacing is greater than the half wavelength. To alleviate the large number of elements and the high Side-Lobe Level (SLL) occurred at large scales, the Genetic Algorithm (GA) optimization technique is considered for thinning the proposed antenna array by estimating the optimal set of “on” and “off” elements corresponding to the minimum SLL without degrading the directivity of the radiation pattern. Also, the proposed array configuration is designed with adaptive beamforming capability using the Least Mean Square (LMS) technique. The effectiveness of the proposed GA-LMS approach is investigated by performing several MATLAB simulations under various set of array configurations. Results reveal that the suggested thinned Eisenstein fractile antenna array using GA-LMS approach is superior in terms of multiband and wideband performance, array element reduction, SLL reduction, grating lobe elimination, and beamforming capability. This elucidates the robustness of the suggested thinned Eisenstein fractile array as a promising design for multiband, wideband, compact, inexpensive, and adaptive smart antennas in modern wireless systems.