Evolutionary Algorithms for Synthesis of Uniform Circular Array with Minimum Side Lobe Level and Maximum Directivity

Banani Basu #1, G. K. Mahanti *2

#

Dept. of Electronics and Communication Engineering National Institute of Technology, Durgapur, India
1

basu_banani@yahoo.in

Dept. of Electronics and Communication Engineering National Institute of Technology, Durgapur, India
2

gautammahanti@yahoo.com

Abstract In recent years, evolutionary optimization (EO) techniques have attracted considerable attention in the design of electromagnetic systems of increasing complexity. This paper describes a method of synthesis of uniform circular array antenna using three recent search heuristics: Modified Particle Swarm Optimization (MPSO), Differential Evolution (DE) and Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) optimization algorithms. The objective of the work is to generate a pencil beam with minimum Side Lobe Level (SLL) and maximum possible directivity. Excitation of individual array elements is computed using the algorithms. Dynamic Range Ratio (DRR) of current amplitude distribution is fixed at an optimum value. Phase of excitation distribution is fixed at zero degree. Simulation results illustrate the performance of MPSO, DE and ABC regarding their applicability as numerical optimization techniques. Keywords Uniform Circular Array, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Differential Evolution (DE), Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), Directivity.

radiation pattern with minimum SLL and maximum possible directivity. DRR of the excitation distributions are set to a lower value in order to reduce coupling effect. However mutual coupling between individual elements are not considered in our work. In this article we use a relatively new optimization approach namely artificial bee colony (ABC) optimization to compute the excitations of individual array elements and corresponding array pattern is reproduced. Few other optimization approaches like PSO and DE are also employed to design the same array and consequent array patterns are compared. The purpose and contribution of this paper is to present a comparative evaluation of PSO, DE, and ABC in the synthesis of uniform circular antenna arrays. II. FORMULATION Consider a circular array of N half-wavelength dipoles lying along a circle of radius r in the x-y plane with intermediate spacing d as shown in fig. 1. The array factor in the horizontal in x-y plane is given by eq.1.

I. INTRODUCTION The uniform circular array has found many applications in direction finding, scanning, sonar, radar and wireless communications [1-3]. It also serves as a promising candidate for the base stations of cellular networks where both omnidirectional and directional patterns are required for broadcasting channels [4]. They have important advantages over linear arrays, for example, the possibility of controlling a beam in azimuth by circularly shifting the array excitations. However, this type of structures usually suffers from high SLL. Different optimization techniques have been adopted to compute the array parameters in order to obtain a good radiation characteristic. The use of these optimizers is widely and clearly appreciated in the synthesis problem. To date, different algorithms like GA, PSO, DE have been successfully applied to different electromagnetic problems including antenna design and array synthesis [5-6]. There are many published articles dealing with the synthesis of circular array using different evolutionary optimizers. In this paper we synthesis an uniform circular array of half wave dipoles. The objective of this work is to generate

Fig1: Uniform Circular Array

978-1-4244-9074-5/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE

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F ( , ) =

I
n =1

exp( j[kr sin cos( n )])

(1)

Where, N is the number of array elements, [ 2, 2] , [0,2 ] and n = 2(n 1)/N.

Vdmax shrinks performances of optimization improves. Position clipping technique is avoided in modified PSO algorithm. Moreover, the cost evaluations of errant particles (positions outside the domain of interest) are discarded to improve the speed of the algorithm. The algorithm is run for 2000 2 iterations and swarm size is chosen as 50. F ( , ) F ( , ) (2) Next DE/best/1/bin strategy [7] is applied to solve the same P ( , ) = 10 log10 = 20 log10 F ( , ) max F ( , ) max example. DE is run for 1000 iterations and number of population is set 100 in order to have similar computational Evolutionary algorithms are used to optimize the antenna time. In DE, a trial solution for a parent is produced using the array shown in Fig.1. The radiation patterns (pencil beam) recombination of a mutant vector and the parent vector. F is produced by the array is required to satisfy the condition of the scaling factor which affects the differential variation low SLL, high directivity and optimum dynamic range ratio. between two solutions and was set to 0.8 in our experiments. In order to optimize the antenna array according to the above Value of the crossover rate, which controls the change of the three conditions, a cost function J is formed as a weighted diversity of the population, was chosen 0.9. sum of the three respective terms, as given by the following Finally ABC algorithm [8] is employed for optimizing the equation: same. Number of colony size and maximum cycles are chosen (3) 100 and 1000 respectively as before to keep the total number J = w1 SLL w2 DIR + w3 ( DRR DRRd ) 2 of objective function evaluations (10000) same. Other DRR, DRRd are obtained and desired values of significant control parameters in ABC are limit=200, scout corresponding terms. DRR is computed from the given production period SPP= 400 and modification rate MR=400. expression. When scout production period (SPP) completes, abandoned solutions are determined by using limit parameter. The max (I n ) (4) DRR = scout is always replaced with a new randomly produced min (I n ) solution provided that only one scout is allowed to occur in Excitation of individual array elements is suitably each cycle. Now the comparison of the above algorithms is presented optimized in order to minimize the cost function which in turn shapes the radiation pattern produced by the proposed array. in a statistical manner. Each algorithm is run for 50 times and Antenna parameters specifying the excitation of individual a best result for each run is considered. Additional concepts about PSO, DE and ABC can easily be array elements are considered as the position coordinates xin of the randomly chosen solution. Given the values of xin (n found in the literature cited bellow. The algorithms are designed to generate a vector of 20 real =1, . . . , N), a corresponding value of the cost function J(xi1, values between zero and one, which in turn mapped and xi2, . . . , xi N ) is derived. The algorithms applied calculate the scaled to desired amplitude weight between 0 and 1. best position that corresponds to the minimum cost value Jmin. Excitation current phases are fixed at 0 degree. Desired DRR III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION value of amplitude distribution is prefixed at 7. Table 1 present the array performances obtained using A 20-element circular array antenna is studied in this article. The array elements are identical and spacing between two MPSO, DE and ABC. The value of SLL obtained using consecutive elements is fixed at 0.5 . The desired user MPSO, DE and ABC is -19.41, -19.22 and -19.65 direction of the array beam is considered at = 90 and = 0. respectively. It is seen that ABC lowered the SLL most The array is optimized in order to improve the array pattern in efficiently. Though, all the algorithms produced almost similar results in terms of cost function subjected to terms of SLL, DIR and DRR value. Three different algorithms Modified PSO, DE and ABC minimization. Directivity found in the three cases is 11.38, algorithms are implemented to optimize the proposed array. 11.31 and 11.37 respectively. The fluctuations of DRR in all In order to present a comprehensive overview, all the the three cases are not more than 0.1. Excitation current algorithms are given same computation time and amplitude of different elements using different algorithms are plotted bellow. computational resources.

k = 2 / =free-space wave number, = wavelength at the design frequency, d is the inter-element spacing . In is the excitation current amplitude of each element where excitation phase is kept at zero degree. Normalized power pattern in dB can be expressed as follows

starting at 0.9 and decreasing linearly to 0.4 at the 0.8 times maximum iteration number, rand1 and rand2 are two uniform random numbers between 0 and 1.The maximum particle velocity is set to the upper limit of the dynamic range of the search i.e. equal to 1. We apply velocity clipping technique where maximum particle velocity [6] decreases linearly from Vdmax to 0.1* Vdmax over the full range of search. As

In modified PSO [5] we set c1, c2 = acceleration constants =1.4945. w=inertia weight linearly damped with iterations

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Table 1: Array performances using MPSO, DE, ABC

Algorithms MPSO DE ABC

Side Lobe Level (SLL) -19.4163 -19.2218 -19.6525

DIR 11.3824 11.3177 11.3784

DRR 7.0746 6.9690 7.0605

All the three algorithms run for 50 repetitions to set the values of different parameters those have significant impact on the efficiency and reliability of the algorithms. The best result found so far is presented in the article. It is noticed that, as the population size increases the number of iterations required to solve the functions reduces. It is expected that, more particles would search more space, and a solution would then be found sooner. However, as the population increases, iterations represent a greater cost, as more particles call upon the evaluation function. In our work, we set the product of population number and maximum number of iterations almost same for all the algorithms for having similar computation time.

Fig 4: Excitation amplitude of different elements using ABC

Fig.5. Normalized absolute power patterns in dB

Fig 2: Excitation amplitude of different elements using MPSO

Radiation patterns using the optimized data computed by the three different optimizers are plotted above. Fig.5. shows the normalized absolute power patterns (pencil-beam) in dB for uniformly spaced circular array. All three algorithms run independently to justify their effectiveness. Results show that ABC is the best performing algorithm. However DE converges faster compared to MPSO. It produces similar results over repeated runs. The modification introduced in standard PSO makes the algorithm (MPSO) very suitable to find the global minimum. Though, it makes the execution time little longer compared to its other two competitors. It is seen that there is a substantial improvement in the array performances in terms of SLL and directivity using the optimizers. IV. CONCLUSION The paper illustrates the performances of the uniform circular array in terms of side lobe level and directivity. A performance comparison between different evolutionary optimizers is presented to design the array. Results prove the superiority of ABC compared to PSO and DE in terms of accuracy and convergence time. The main advantage of ABC is that it is not sensitive to initial parameter values and not affected by the increasing dimension of the problem. It is seen

Fig 3: Excitation amplitude of different elements using DE

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that all the algorithms produce almost similar results. Array patterns obtained using the algorithms are improved significantly. Side lobe level is reduced substantially and directivity of the array is also enhanced. Dynamic range of excitations is kept at a lower value to reduce the coupling effect between array elements. In future, possible variations of ABC, DE and PSO may be studied for further improvement of the radiation pattern. Proposed technique is capable of exploring more complex geometries and therefore suitable for more complex application. REFERENCES
[1] [2] [3] R. S. Elliott. 2003. Antenna Theory and Design. New York: IEEE/Wiley Interscience. Du, K. L, Pattern analysis of uniform circular array, IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, Vol. 52, No. 4, 11251129, 2004. Panduro, M. A., A. L. Mendez, R. Dominguez, and G. Romero,Design of non-uniform circular antenna arrays for side lobe reduction using the method of genetic algorithms,AEU International

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