Side lobe reduction of a concentric circular antenna array using genetic algorithm

A concentric circular antenna array (CCAA) consists of elements positioned on the periphery of imaginary circles on a plane having a common centre and different radii. The simplest way to feed the elements of such an array is to use uniform excitation. However, with a non-uniform excitation profile, considerable reduction of the side lobe level (SLL) may be achieved at the cost of the added complexity. The difference of SLLs (with respect to the uniform excitation case) becomes even more prominent when the beamwidth of the antenna needs to be kept fixed. In this paper, we formulate the task of designing a non-uniformly excited CCAA as a constrained optimization problem and use genetic algorithm (GA) to solve the same. The goal is to determine an optimum set of weights for antenna elements which provides a radiation pattern with maximum SLL reduction with the constraint of a fixed beamwidth.