Analysis of injection-locked antenna array including mutual coupling effects

In this paper, the injection locking performance analysis of dipole antenna array with each element loaded with a two-terminal oscillator is presented. The analysis is based on the nonlinear model of oscillator and the linear model of antenna array considering mutual coupling effects. The locking range of injection signal and the array radiated power are obtained by solving an equivalent multiport network. In general, the solutions include stable and unstable solutions. The Routh-Hurwitz stability criterion is then applied to remove the unstable solutions. Numerical results show that the array performance such as frequency locking range and radiated power by taking into account the array mutual coupling effects is quite different from that of an isolated antenna element. In addition, the influence of antenna element spacing upon array locking parameters in this paper is found to be consistent with other existing theories.