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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

4, 2005 425

Automated Design of a Three-Dimensional Fishbone


Antenna Using Parallel Genetic Algorithm and NEC
Xing Chen, Kama Huang, Senior Member, IEEE, and Xiao-Bang Xu, Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract—A new antenna configuration, named the three-di- clearly three-dimensional and thus is referred to as a three-di-
mensional fishbone antenna (3DFA), as an improvement of the mensional fishbone antenna (3DFA).
conventional fishbone antenna, is presented in this letter. It consists
of dipoles that may be of nonuniform lengths with unequal spacing
and are allowed to tilt in haphazard directions. To achieve a high II. AUTOMATED ANTENNA DESIGN USING GA AND NEC
endfire gain and good impedance match, the structural parame- The genetic algorithm (GA) [2] is a nonlinear, robust stochastic
ters of the 3DFA are optimized in an automated design, making
use of the genetic algorithm (GA) in conjunction with numerical
optimization algorithm based on the Darwinian theory of decent
electromagnetic codes (NEC) and cluster parallel computation. with modification by natural selection. It has found great utility
The design results are presented and discussed. A prototype of in electromagnetic optimization tasks due to its many advantages
such designed 3DFA has been fabricated and tested. The measured over traditional gradient-based optimization strategies. The GA
radiation pattern and the return loss of the antenna are compared has already been successfully applied to the design of various
with the computational results, and a good agreement is observed.
Another such designed 3DFA has achieved an endfire gain up to
antennas, including wire antennas [3], [4], patch antennas [5],
16.72 dBi, which surpass the maximum gain of a conventional and antenna arrays [6].
Yagi–Uda antenna with the same number of elements by 87%. Numerical electromagnetic codes (NEC) is a method of mo-
Index Terms—Cluster parallel computation, fishbone antenna,
ments (MoM) simulator for wire antennas, which was developed
genetic algorithm (GA), numerical electromagnetic codes (NEC). at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the early 1980s.
Since then, it has been widely used in antenna simulation and
design [3], [4], [7], [8]. In this research, the second version of
I. INTRODUCTION NEC (NEC2) is used for computing the radiation properties of
the 3DFAs designed.
A S described in [1], a fishbone antenna is an end-fire, trav-
eling wave antenna consisting of a balanced transmission
line to which is coupled, usually through lumped circuit ele-
An automated antenna design based on GA usually invokes
hundreds or even thousands of numerical simulations, hence, it
ments, an array of closely-spaced, coplanar dipoles. The dipoles is computationally intensive. Since the GA exhibits an intrinsic
of a conventional fishbone antenna, as a two-dimensional array, parallelism and allows a very straightforward implementation
normally have uniform length and spacing. Applications of the on parallel computers, we implement the GA-based antenna
conventional fishbone antennas are limited, not as popular as design into parallel computation to make the computation more
the other directive wire antennas, such as the Yagi–Uda and effective. The computation is parallelized in a master-slave
log-periodic antennas. However, the performance of conven- model and is carried out in a Beowulf cluster system, which is
tional fishbone antennas may be improved after certain modi- composed of 16 AMD 1700+ processors interconnected by a fast
fications and optimizations. In this letter, we present a new con- 100 Mb/s Ethernet and uses the message passing interface (MPI)
figuration of the fishbone antenna, the dipoles of which are no library. One processor, named the master processor, controls the
longer constrained to be of uniform length and spacing, and antenna design procedure. While the other processors, called
they are allowed to tilt in haphazard directions. To simplify slave processors, carry out the numerical simulations using
its structure and elevate its radiation efficiency, the dipoles are NEC2. The flow chart of the automated antenna design procedure
fed by a balanced transmission line – the lumped circuit ele- is illustrated in Fig. 1.
ments used in conventional fishbone antennas are eliminated;
and the dipoles are symmetric about the axis of the transmission III. AUTOMATED DESIGN OF THE THREE-DIMENSIONAL
line. The proposed new configuration of the fishbone antenna is FISHBONE ANTENNA
Fig. 2 illustrates a top view of the 3DFA studied in this re-
search, which is comprised of 10 dipoles indexed from 1 to 10
Manuscript received August 18, 2005; revised September 20, 2005. The work along the -axis. The antenna is made of 5-mm-diameter metal
of X. Chen and K. Huang was supported by the National Natural Science Foun- wires and operates at a frequency . Its transmis-
dation of China under Grant 10476013 and by the National Science Fund of sion line is located in the plane. For convenience of fabrica-
China for Distinguished Young Scholars (60125102).
X. Chen and K. Huang are with the College of Electronic and Information tion and installation, all the dipoles are arranged to be above the
Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdo 610064, China. plane. The antenna is fed by a 50- coaxial cable through
X.-B. Xu is with the Holcombe Department of Electrical and Computer a balun (contraction for “balanced to unbalanced”) [9],
Engineering, Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634-0915 USA (e-mail:
ecexu@ces.clemson.edu). which is employed for eliminating the unbalanced currents and
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2005.859384 for impedance transformation.
1536-1225/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE

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426 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 4, 2005

TABLE I
STRUCTURAL PARAMETERS OF 3DFA-I AND 3DFA-II

Fig. 3. Prototype of the 3DFA.

) of the dipole; the spacing ( ) between the


and dipoles; the elevation angle ( )
of the dipole with respect to the -axis; the azimuth angle
( ) of the dipole with respect to the -axis;
the distance between the two wires of the transmission line;
and the impedance transformation ratio of the balun. The
Fig. 1. Flow chart of the automated antenna design procedure.
parameters and are confined within the range of to
, where is the wavelength, is restricted to be from 10
to 50 mm, and is chosen from integers of 1–6.
A set of automated design processes are executed. In each
of them, the 3DFAs designed are simulated by NEC2, and
their structural parameters are optimized by a binary GA. The
GA employs tournament selection with elitism, single-point
crossover with probability , and jump mutation with
probability ; and it uses 200 generations, 410 chro-
mosomes, and 96 individuals in a population. Since the design
process based on GA is a process that uses random number
Fig. 2. Top view of the 3DFA. streams, it may move in different directions and subsequently
may converge to different results.
The design goal of the 3DFA is to achieve high endfire gain
IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
and good impedance match. Therefore, the fitness function is
defined as The automated design of the 3DFA has generated several en-
couraging results. The structural parameters of two of such de-
(1) signed 3DFA, named as “3DFA-I” and “3DFA-II”, are presented
in Table I. In this table, the parameters and are in mm, and
where and are the weight factors for the endfire gain are in degrees.
and the voltage standing wave ratio, (VSWR), respectively, they To validate the results of the automated antenna design, a pro-
are set to be and totype of the proposed 3DFA has been fabricated and tested. Its
structural parameters are taken to be that of 3DFA-I listed in
if
(2) Table I. As shown in Fig. 3, the prototype antenna resides on an
if
organic plastic board and its dipoles are propped by glass poles.
The fitness function defined in (1) is maximized in the GA It is fed by a 50- coaxial cable through a 1:4 coil-wound balun.
optimization procedure. The following 41 structural parameters To illustrate its size, a 30-mm ruler is placed in front of it as a
of the 3DFA are to be optimized: the half length ( contrast.

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CHEN et al.: AUTOMATED DESIGN OF A 3DFA USING PARALLEL GENETIC ALGORITHM AND NEC 427

Fig. 4. Comparison of the computed and measured radiation pattern for


3DFA-I.

The radiation pattern of the prototype 3DFA-I measured in the


plane is compared with the computational results obtained
by using NEC2. A good agreement between the measured and
the computed results, illustrated in Fig. 4, validates the accuracy
of the numerical simulation using the NEC and the reliability of
the automated design. The NEC-computed input impedance of
the 3DFA-I is , which would result in a
return loss. The measured return loss is , which is in
reasonably good agreement with the computed value and veri-
fies that a good impedance match is achieved.
The input impedance of the 3DFA-II computed using NEC2
is . The corresponding VSWR is only 1.0067 after
employing a 1:4 balun. The radiation patterns of the 3DFA-II are
shown in Fig. 5. As illustrated in Fig. 5, this antenna has an end-
fire gain as high as 16.72 dBi. In contrast to this, the maximum
gain of a conventional Yagi–Uda antenna, which also consists
of 10 elements, is only about 14 dbi [10], [11]. These results
show that the endfire gain of the 3DFA-II is 87% higher than
that of a conventional Yagi–Uda antenna with the same number
of elements. Comparing with Yagi–Uda antennas with more el- Fig. 5. Radiation pattern of 3DFA-II in the (a) XY plane and in the
(b) XZ plane.
ements, the endfire gain of the 3DFA-II can still be higher. For
example, the NEC-computed maximum gain of a Yagi–Uda an-
tenna with 14 elements is 15.9 dBi, and is only 16.3 dBi even The quality of the automated design of the antenna depends
after a GA optimization [3]. heavily on the population size of the GA employed. Limited by
the computation capacity of the available cluster system, this
research only used a population size of 96 to optimize a very
V. CONCLUSION complex and highly unconstrained structure with 41 parameters.
In contrast, the research presented in [12] and [13] used a pop-
A new antenna configuration, 3DFA, as an improvement of
ulation size of 6000 to optimize antennas with fewer structure
the conventional fishbone antenna, is presented in this letter. The
parameters. Apparently, the performance of the proposed 3DFA
GA in conjunction with the NEC and cluster parallel compu-
may be further improved if a more powerful supercomputer is
tation is employed for automated design of the antenna. One
available for the optimization.
of such designed 3DFA was fabricated and tested. The mea-
surement data for the radiation pattern and return loss are com-
pared with the computational results, and a good agreement is REFERENCES
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428 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 4, 2005

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