Optimal Design of Aperiodic Reconfigurable Antenna Array Suitable for Broadcasting Applications

An aperiodic reconfigurable microstrip antenna array is designed to serve as a DVB-T base station antenna operating in a single broadcasting channel. The antenna array is optimized at 698 MHz (center frequency of DVB-T channel 49) to concurrently achieve a particular radiation pattern shaping with high forward gain, main lobe tilting and null filling inside the service area, as well as low sidelobe level outside the service area, and low standing wave ratio at the inputs of all the array elements. To concurrently satisfy all the above requirements, both the geometry dimensions and the array feeding weights (amplitudes and phases) are optimized, thus leading to a complex multi-variable and multi-objective problem. The problem is solved by applying a recently developed particle swarm optimization (PSO) improved variant, called PSO with velocity mutation, in conjunction with the CST software package, which is employed by the PSOvm every time a full-wave analysis is required. Furthermore, all the optimization methods found in the CST environment are compared with the PSOvm. The results show that the PSOvm is capable of producing an antenna array geometry, which is closer to the predefined requirements than the geometries derived by the rest of the optimizers, in the least amount of computational time.