Mutual Coupling in Beamforming with Circular Array

It has shown that uniform circular arrays (UCAs) have better performance than uniform rectangular arrays, especially for azimuthal beamforming, when the antenna elements are isolated isotropic point sources. However, in practice, the elements of antenna arrays have physical dimensions and certain radiation characteristics. When two antennas are close to each other, some of the energy from one antenna is coupled to the other, which is referred to as mutual coupling (MC). This paper investigates the beamforming performance of the UCA with real antenna elements and considers the mutual coupling