Pattern recovery in failed antenna arrays by partial control of real-weights

In large antenna arrays possibility of getting faults for some of the radiating elements can not be denied at all the times. In such situations the pattern of the array gets distorted, mostly with an increasing side lobe level (SLL). In this paper a cost effective and simple compensation technique using particle swarm optimization (PSO) is presented. This approach is carried out by optimizing the amplitude excitations of some of the unfailed array elements to recover the original pattern. The effect of number of array elements taking part in the process of compensation to reduce the SLL is demonstrated through this paper. Numerical results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of this method.