Irregular Subarray Tiling via Heuristic Iterative Convex Relaxation Programming

The design of irregular subarrayed planar phased arrays composed of modular tiles is a research area of increasing interest. In this article, a heuristic iterative convex relaxation programming (H-ICRP) framework is proposed. By formulating the tiling of irregular subarray as a binary programming problem, this framework is suitable for arbitrary array aperture and subarray structure. To achieve exact aperture cover, the nonconvex binary constraint is relaxed to a convex approximation and solved through multiple iterations. Furthermore, for better performance of the scanning radiation pattern, the multitask Bayesian compressive sensing (MT-BCS) solver is adopted to find a heuristic initial iteration point instead of randomizing, such that the robustness and effectiveness can be improved remarkably. Good performance and potentialities of the proposed method are verified by comparing with existing approaches in various numerical examples.