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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
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CHEN et al.: AUTOMATED DESIGN OF A 3DFA USING PARALLEL GENETIC ALGORITHM AND NEC 427
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428 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 4, 2005
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