Advanced Strategy for Large Antenna Array Design With Subarray-Only Amplitude and Phase Control

An advanced version of the Contiguous Partition Method (CPM) aimed at designing subarrayed antenna arrays with control of the excitation amplitudes and phases only at the subarray level is presented. Starting from the quantized distribution of the amplitude weights yielded through the optimal excitation matching procedure based on the CPM, a successive phase-clustering of the array elements belonging to each CPM amplitude aggregation is carried out to further simplify the antenna architecture still keeping the wide angular sector steering property of the array. A set of representative results is reported and discussed to assess the features and potentialities of the proposed technique.