On the optimal design of non-uniform concentric circular antenna arrays

In this paper, the design of non-uniform concentric circular antenna arrays (CCAAs) of isotropic radiators with optimum side lobe level reduction is presented. The newly-proposed global evolutionary optimization methods; namely: the biogeography based optimization (BBO) is used to determine a set of weights that provides a radiation pattern with optimum side lobe level reduction with the constraint of a fixed major lobe beamwidth. The results obtained from BBO are compared with those obtained using the Matlab function Fmincon which uses a sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method. The comparison shows that the design of non-uniformly excited CCAAs using SQP method provides a side lobe level reduction that is better than that obtained using global stochastic optimization methods, indicating that global optimization techniques are not really needed in this problem.