Multiple jamming suppression with minimum redundant antenna arrays for radar systems

Adaptive antenna arrays are widely used because of their effectiveness in suppressing strong jamming signals that are received on a sidelobe of the main antenna pattern. In an adaptive antenna systems for jamming suppression, it is customary to assume that the array is composed of equally spaced elements and to avoid aliasing or grading lobes in the antenna pattern; the spaces between the elements are assumed to be the half wavelength X/2. This array structure, whose array elements are assumed to be identical and omnidirectional, is referred to as uniform regular array (URA). However, the cost and complexity of a fully adaptive URA is prohibitive for some applications which require a large number of elements. The main objective of this paper is to investigate the jamming suppression capability of a class of adaptive arrays whose array elements are selected by a particular non-uniform thinning technique so as to achieve better cancellation beam resolution than URA, but with a lesser number of array elements and at a far reduced level of complexity.