A Thinned Irregular Array Synthesis Approach Based on Benders Decomposition

A thinned irregular tiled array synthesis approach is proposed for 5G base station array design. To fit the needs of multiusers, different sizes of vertical tiles with thinned elements ae considered. The tiling configuration and excitations are optimized to achieve high gain, low sidelobes, and wide-angle scanning simultaneously. A mixed integer second-order cone programming (MISOCP) model is obtained from convexity analysis and transformation. Besides, a generalized Benders decomposition algorithm is built to decouple the complex original problem into mixed integer linear programming (MILP) master problems and convex second-order cone programming (SOCP) subproblems, which is used to solve the large-scale problems efficiently. Irregular partition optimization is based on full-wave simulations of regular finite arrays. The joint effects of active VSWR and radiation patterns are considered to reduce the mismatch between element simulations and final performances. Numerical results show that the 5G array synthesized by the proposed approach is superior to those reported by the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both E- and H-plane scans and the number of T/R modules.