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Synthesis of cosecant squared pattern in linear antenna arrays using differential

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DOI: 10.1109/CICT.2013.6558248

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 Proceedings of 2013 IEEE Conference on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT 2013)

Synthesis of Cosecant Squared Pattern in Linear

Antenna Arrays using Differential Evolution
Ananda Kumar Behera, Aamir Ahmad, S. K. Mandal, G. K. Mahanti, Rowdra Ghatak
Dept. of Electronics and Communication Engg.
National Institute of Technology Durgapur
West Bengal, India
anand.sic@gmail.com, aamir477@gmail.com, skmandal2006@gmail.com.

cosecant squared radiation pattern are used for costal and

Abstract— In this paper, a cosecant squared shaped beam
pattern is synthesized from a uniformly spaced but non-
uniformly excited linear antenna array where the uniform
spacing of the array elements is considered as half of the
desired signal wavelength. The shaped beam pattern is
synthesized for the angular beam width of 320 by reducing
the side lobe level (SLL) to -20.06 dB and almost without
any ripple in the shaped region. To get the desired pattern,
excitation coefficients and the static phase shift of the array
elements are taken as the optimizing parameters and the
differential evolution (DE) algorithm is used as the
optimizing algorithm. It is further observed that the desired
array pattern is remained unaltered for a band of frequency
on either side of the operating frequency.
Index Terms— Linear Array (LA), Side lobe level (SLL),
Cosecant Squared Pattern (CSP), Differential Evolution
(DE).
I. INTRODUCTION
The synthesis of antenna arrays with the desired
radiation pattern is a nonlinear based optimization
problem and for its solution many analytical techniques
such as Taylor series method and Dolph–Chebyshev
methods are introduced [1]. But the analytical techniques
in synthesizing shaped beam pattern such as flat-top
pattern, cosecant squared pattern (CSP), are not efficient
enough to provide optimum pattern as it produce
unwanted ripple in the shaped region. So in order to get
the best result the stochastic methods [2, 3] are necessary.
For a symmetrical array synthesis a Genetic Algorithm
(GA) method is presented in [4] for the optimization of
the weights of the array elements with element spacing of
Ȝ/2; where Ȝ is the wavelength of the operating signal. Also a
binary genetic algorithm is used in [5] for thinning
isotropic array. The Cosecant Squared Pattern (CSP) is
preferred due to the fact that, this pattern can provides
high gain near the horizon [6] where the range is higher
but low gain at high-elevation angles where range is
lower. Thus, this pattern is useful for an aircraft system
because when the aircraft is near the horizon its range is
higher whereas at high elevation angle its range is lower.
As a result when it moves from the horizon to towards
the higher elevation, the corresponding aircraft receiver
gets almost constant power at different elevation angles
although its range is changing. Also antennas with
air surveillance radars because of its efficient scanning
ability in the space. A cosecant squared radiation pattern
can be achieved by using multiple feeders and a reflector
antenna.
In [7], Haddadi and Ghorbani applied a weighted
alternating reverse projection (WARP) method to
synthesize a 12 element linear array with a spacing of
0.5 λ and they obtain the cosecant squared pattern in the
range about 350 with the ripple level of about 0.5 dB.
Although, Orchard et al. [8] introduced a method to
synthesize the power pattern from linear array but the
solution is not the optimum one because, the reduced
ripple results in shrinkage of the shaped region and
increases the complexity of the array excitation. A
number of optimization methods such as particle swarm
optimization [9], genetic algorithm [10, 11], simulate
annealing [12] etc. have been applied for the synthesis of
antenna array. Hwang synthesized a CSP for a 13 element
non-uniformly slotted rectangular waveguide array [9].
In this paper Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm is
used for optimizing the non uniform excitation
coefficients and static phase shifts of a linear array
elements to generate a cosecant squared pattern (CSP) in
the far field power pattern of the array. The obtained CSP
has the much fewer ripples in the shaped region and also
have a lower side lobe level (SLL). DE algorithm
introduced by Storn and Price [13] is preferred because it
is a population based, stochastic evolutionary algorithm.
The algorithm uses a fewer control parameters and also
has the ability to find the true minima not depending

Manuscript received February 15, 2013. Ananda Kumar

Behera1, Aamir Ahmad2, S. K. Mandal3, G. K. Mahanti4, Rowdra Fig.1. Linear array having N-element
Ghatak5. Dept. of Electronics and Communication Engg. National
Institute of Technology Durgapur, West Bengal, India
upon the initial parameters values [13]. In the DE

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 Proceedings of 2013 IEEE Conference on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT 2013)
algorithm the vector differences of floating-point
parameters are found out instead of the uniform or point
crossovers on binary strings which are followed in the
genetic algorithm (GA). The most significant advantage
of the DE compared to the GA is that it helps us in
optimizing large antenna arrays with more computational
efficiency compared to the GA.
II. LINEAR ARRAY
A configuration of multiple antenna elements
arranged along a straight line is known as linear array. A
linear array having N-isotropic elements placed along y-
axis, as shown in figure.1. Generally suitable values of
three parameters as amplitude, phase and the inter
element spacing are considered to design an antenna
array for the desired radiation pattern. The radiation
pattern of an antenna array is the sum of the contribution
of all the signals radiated by the individual array elements
and can be obtained by the array factor expression as
given in (1), [1].
 A F = N A e i ( k y n s i n θ + φ n ) ǤǤǤǤǤǤሺͳሻ
¦ n
n =1
Where, An is the normalized excitation coefficient
of the n-th element, k = 2π λ , the wave number; θ , the
angle made by the line joining the observing point and
the origin with the z-axis; yn and φn be the position
and static phase of the n-th element respectively. Hence
from (1), it is observed that the desired power pattern
from a linear array can be synthesized with the suitable
values of the normalized amplitude coefficients, A n and
static phase shift φn of the array elements. In this paper,
the effectiveness of DE algorithm is applied to select the
suitable values of A n and φn for n=1,2,….N to generate
the desired pattern.
III. DE ALGORITHM
In 1995, Price and Storn commenced the Differential
Evolution (DE) algorithm which is based upon
differential mutation operator. Practically there are many
problems with different types of objective functions such
as non-linear, noisy, flat, non-differentiable, non-
continuous, and multi-dimensional or have many local
minima which are difficult to solve analytically. DE is a
robust statistical method for cost function minimization
which does not make use of a single nominal parameter
vector but instead it uses a population of equally
important vectors and is very advantageous to find the
most approximate solution to any of this type of
problems. In DE algorithm the objective function is
sampled by a set of initial points which are chosen
randomly from the entire search space. Then in the next
step the algorithm adds the weighted difference between
the two randomly selected population vectors to the third
random population vector to generate a new parameter
vector. This process of generating the new parameter
978-1-4673-5758-6/13/$31.00 © 2013 IEEE
vector is called mutation. Now this parameter vector is
further mixed with the predefined parameters to produce
the trial vector and this process is called crossover. Then
in the last step, called selection in which trial vector is
replaced by the target vector if the trial vector reduces the
values of the cost function than that obtained due to the
target vector. To realize the algorithm let the problem is a
function of D number of independent parameters. In this
work for N element array, the number of independent
parameters is 2N in which the first N parameters are the
normalized amplitude coefficient of the N array elements
and remaining N parameters are to represent the static
phase of each element. Hence, if NP be the population
size then the parameter vectors are represented as -
X k ,G = [ x1, k ,G , x2, k ,G ,......xD , k ,G ]k … (2)
Where k = 1, 2, 3 ...NP and G is the generation number.
The four basic steps of DE algorithm are as follows -
Step-1 Initialisation:
If the upper and lower bounds for each parameter
l u
are defined as xi ≤ xi ,k ,1 ≤ xi for i = 1,2,….D, then
the NP number of D dimensional vectors are randomly
generated from the interval [ xil , xiu ] to initiate the
searching process.
Step-2 Mutation:
In this step the search space is expanded from its
initial locations. Two vectors X r1,G and X r 2,G are
selected randomly for a kth target vector X k ,G . Let
X best ,G is the best vector of the current population then
the donor vector Vk ,G is formed as in (3).
Vk ,G = X best ,G + F ( X r1,G − X r 2,G ) …… (3)
Where F is the mutation factor and the range of F is [0,
2].
Step-3 Crossover:
In this step the solutions from the previous
generation is obtained successfully. A trial vector U k , G is
obtained by exchanging the elements of the target vector
X k , G and the donor vector V k , G with a crossover
probability CR [0, 1].
Step-4 Selection:
The best value for the next generation is selected as
­U k ,G , if f (U k ,G ) ≤ f ( X k ,G )
X k ,G +1 = ® ......... (4)
¯ X k ,G , if f (U k ,G ) > f ( X k ,G )
For k=1, 2, 3 ... NP
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 Proceedings of 2013 IEEE Conference on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT 2013)

The target vector compared with the trial vector and the
minimum value is admitted to the next generation. The
above steps are continued until the predefined number of
generation is reached or the desired value of the cost
function is obtained.
Now for this work the DE parameters are as follows.
The array is considered as a 30 element array. Hence, it is
a 60 dimensional problem. The initial population size is
taken as 50 and these are randomly generated by a [50 ×
60] matrix whereas the mutation factor and the crossover
probability are taken as 0.5 and 0.85 respectively.

IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

To demonostrat the proposed work, linear antenna
array of 30 eIement is considered with equal element
spacing of 0.5 λ . It is desired that the radiated power
pattern from the array follow the cosecant square function
for at least 300 angular widths and the maximum value of Fig.2. The optimized pattern obtained using DE (solid line) and the actual
SLL is ” -20dB. For the desired pattern, the normalized cosec square plot (dotted line) for the desired range.
amplitude coefficients and the static phase shifts of the
array elements are taken as the optimizing parameters of
Table.1. Normalized amplitude and phase of the individual the DE algorithm. The cost function used for the
antenna array element optimizing algorithm is as given in (5).
Normalized Static phase shift,
Element number
amplitude f cos t = W1 H1δ12 + W2 H 2δ 22 + ∆ sum (5)
(n)
coefficients, (An)
φ n (degree)
Where, δ1 = SLLmax − SLLd , δ 2 = Rmax − Rd ; SLLmax
1 0.0226 122.24
and Rmax are the maximum value of SLL and ripple
2 0.0237 159.94
3 0.1251 155.61
measured at each iteration of the searching process
whereas SLLd and Rd are their corresponding desired
4 0.0556 159.65
5 0.2130 182.66
values. H1 and H2 are the Heaviside step function of the
corresponding terms and ∆ sum is the sum of the
6 0.0058 201.90
7 0.0966 242.32
difference between the sampled values of the array factor
and actual cosecant square values at each point within the
8 0.0999 268.10
desired angular width. The MATLAB code is used to
9 0.1306 285.95 write the algorithm. With the DE parameters as
10 0.0750 313.40 mentioned in section III, the DE algorithm takes 1000
11 0.0119 347.09 iterations to get the desired result. The DE optimized
12 0.2027 019.88 pattern is shown in Fig. 2 and the corresponding optimum
13 0.2079 051.89 values of An and φn are shown in table-1. In Fig. 2, the
14 0.2425 098.95 actual cosecant square plot (dotted line) for the desired
15 0.3240 054.16 range is also shown. From Fig. 2, it is observed that the
16 0.1774 053.32 DE optimized CSP approximately follows the actual plot
17 0.1874 056.92 for the angular width of 330 with the range (98-131)
degrees. The maximum value of the side lobe level is also
18 0.7759 099.41
reduced to ņ20.06 dB and almost without any ripple in
19 0.9655 114.33 the desired pattern. It is further observed that with the
20 0.9804 130.86 variation of the uniform element spacing from 0.3 λ to
21 0.9956 288.43 0.7 λ the obtained pattern is remain unaltered with SLL
22 0.9852 076.73 less than -20dB. Hence this pattern is applicable for the
23 0.9527 090.77 frequency range of 1.67f0 to 0.71f0. However as seen
24 0.8825 092.86 from table-1, the dynamic range ratio (DRR) of
25 0.6870 326.21
amplitude is quite higher (170.4). But when the elements
with lowest amplitude coefficient (6th element) is
26 0.6397 091.09
discarded the corresponding values of DRR becomes
27 0.4839 343.88 almost half (83.66) and the resultant pattern is not
28 0.3902 094.29 affected for that.
29 0.2212 079.21
30 0.1358 356.45 V. CONCLUSION
The differential evolution algorithm is used
successfully for synthesizing a cosecant square pattern in
the radiation pattern of a uniformly spaced but non-

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 Proceedings of 2013 IEEE Conference on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT 2013)
uniformly excited linear antenna arrays. The obtained
pattern is also compared to the cosec square plot in the
desired region. The side lobe level is reduced to ņ20.06
dB with almost zero ripples at the desired region. The
synthesized pattern of the antenna is much more helpful
at the sea bank for effective communication.
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