This version is available at https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/44352/ Strathprints is designed to allow users to access the research output of the University of Strathclyde. Unless otherwise explicitly stated on the manuscript, Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Please check the manuscript for details of any other licences that may have been applied. You may not engage in further distribution of the material for any profitmaking activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute both the url (https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/) and the content of this paper for research or private study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge.Any correspondence concerning this service should be sent to the AbstractIn this work a formation flying based architecture is presented within the context of a distributed antenna array.An artificial potential function method is used to control the formation whereby deviation from an all-to-all interaction scheme and swarm shaping are enabled through a self-similar connection network. Introduction of an asymmetric term in the potential function formulation results in the emergence of structures with a central symmetry. The connection network then groups these identical structures through a hierarchical scheme. This produces a fractal shape which is considered for the first time as a distributed antenna array exploiting the recursive arrangement of its elements to augment performance. A 5-element Purina fractal is used as the base formation which is then replicated a number of times increasing the antenna-array aperture and resulting in a highly directional beam from a relatively low number of elements. Justifications are provided in support of the claimed benefits for distributed antenna arrays exploiting fractal geometries. The formation deployment is simulated in Earth orbit together with analytical proofs completing the arguments aimed to demonstrate feasibility of the concept and the advantages provided by grouping antenna elements into coherent structures.
This paper investigates the use of a Purina fractal array for beamforming. We compare the performance of this array to full lattice arrays of same aperture and element count in terms of beam pattern and complexity. Further, the array's sensitivity to element displacement and failure is investigated. Simulations indicate that the Purina array can offer significant advantages over its benchmarkers particularly in the lower half of the spectrum
Abstract. Fractals have been proven as potential candidates for satellite flying formations, where its different elements represent a thinned array. The distributed and low power nature of the nodes in this network motivates distributed processing when using such an array as a beamformer. This paper proposes such initial idea, and demonstrates that benefits such as strictly limited local processing capability independent of the array's dimension and local calibration can be bought at the expense of a slightly increased overall cost.
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