Hybrid Differential Evolution with Biogeography-Based Optimization for Design of a Reconfigurable Antenna Array with Discrete Phase Shifters

Multibeam antenna arrays have important applications in communications and radar. This paper presents a new method of designing a reconfigurable antenna with quantized phase excitations using a new hybrid algorithm, called DE/BBO. The reconfigurable design problem is to find the element excitation that will result in a sector pattern main beam with low sidelobes with additional requirement that the same excitation amplitudes applied to the array with zero-phase should be in a high directivity, low sidelobe pencil-shaped main beam. In order to reduce the effect of mutual coupling between the antenna-array elements, the dynamic range ratio is minimized. Additionally, compared with the continuous realization and subsequent quantization, experimental results indicate that the performance of the discrete realization of the phase excitation value can be improved. In order to test the performances of hybrid differential evolution with biogeography-based optimization, the results of some state-of-art algorithms are considered, for the purposed of comparison. Experiment results indicate the better performance of the DE/BBO