An Effective Modification of Conventional Beamforming Methods Suitable for Realistic Linear Antenna Arrays

Antenna array beamforming (BF) refers to a real-time procedure that aims at calculating the proper feeding weights applied to the array elements in order to create a main lobe and a number of nulls toward respective preassigned directions. Most of the research performed on BF has been based on a simplified mathematical model, which ignores the nonisotropic radiation pattern of the array elements and the element mutual coupling. This article introduces an innovative way to incorporate the actual radiation pattern of the array elements and the element coupling into two popular deterministic BF methods, thus making these methods applicable to realistic antenna arrays. These two modified methods are applied in several scenarios, where a desired signal and several interference signals with various directions of arrival are received by a realistic microstrip linear antenna array. The statistical analysis performed in every scenario demonstrates the validity and effectiveness of the proposed modification.