Performance Investigations of the Uniformly and Non-Uniformly Excited Linear Arrays

Uniform linear arrays include the arrangement of all array elements in one dimension with equal amplitude excitations. Such types of arrays usually have good directivity, narrow beam-width, and they suffer from high sidelobe levels that may cause interference and degrade the overall system performance. The problem of high side lobe levels may overcome by using non-uniformly excited arrays instead of its uniform counterpart. In this paper, the Dolph and Taylor excited arrays are adopted as a non-uniformly excited array. The performance in terms of half power beam width (HPBW), Peak sidelobe level (SLL), directivity (D), and first null-to-null beam width of the uniformly and the two non-uniformly excited arrays are investigated and compared. Simulation results show that the non-uniformly excited arrays can significantly reduce the peak SLL at the cost of lower directivity and wider HPBW. Thus, it is advised to use the non-uniformly excited arrays in the environments that borne high interference pollution.