Effective Beam Forming Networks for Large Arbitrary Array of Antennas

A deterministic and effective strategy to reduce as much as possible the number of amplitude controls points in large arrays is herein proposed, and applied to cases of practical interest. The proposed strategy exploits two important concepts: the first one, coming from a special class of aperiodic tiling, and the second one based on NuFFT – Non uniform Fast Fourier Transform – techniques. The first one allows designing innovative front-end architectures made of a reduced number of control points, while NuFFT algorithms lead to computationally effective synthesis procedures. The overall results and design guidelines allow to achieve simplified beamforming networks derived from aperiodic tilings, and to know the performances that can be achieved using this approach, particularly in case of low sidelobe requirements. To confirm the usefulness of the proposed tools, numerical examples are discussed. Conclusion follows.