Effects of Symmetry Restriction on the Antenna Gain Optimized Using Genetic Algorithms

Abstract

Automated design techniques for antennas are highly interesting regarding their ability to cut down on development time and their overall importance for communication technology. Sub-dividing a given area into individual pixels renders methods such as genetic algorithms possible, which enables an automated optimization process by evolutionary methods. While there are many examples in the literature that use this approach, most of them use the reflection coefficient as the optimization goal. Although this yields satisfying antennas for a variety of different applications, this approach generally does not achieve high directivities or antenna gains. In this work, we present the evolutionary optimization of antenna gain for pixelated antennas and the effect of symmetry restriction on the optimized topologies.