A Multibeam Subarray Partition Design via Iterative Excitation Amplitude Tournament

Abstract

The subarray-level multibeam structure is advantageous for minimizing system complexity and enhancing multi-target detection and estimation performance. Furthermore, the subarray configuration plays a major role in determining the multibeam antenna pattern parameters. Therefore, we propose a subarray partition technique based on the tournament algorithm to enable spatial multibeam synthesis. In this paper, subarray configuration and excitation are alternately optimized through multiple rounds of tournament iterations. Each iteration calculates subarray excitations using convex optimization methods to fulfill requirements for the main radiation direction and low sidelobes, among other performance criteria. At the same time, excitations for each unassigned array element are calculated within each subarray separately. Simulation results for linear arrays demonstrate the proposed algorithm is not only suitable for linear arrays but also applicable to other array configurations, such as circular ring arrays and cylindrical arrays. And the proposed algorithm is effective in subarray periodicity, suppressing sidelobe levels, and allocating resources based on priority.