Suppression of Antenna's Radiation Sidelobes Using Particle Swarm Optimisation

The presence of large sidelobe radiation beam levels of an antenna is undesirable as the antenna performance and e-ciency will be greatly degraded. Antenna structures especially in array arrangements have the capability to provide interference reduction, improvement of the channel capacity and expanding the range of a signal's coverage. In this paper, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is utilized to optimize the inter-element position of even-element linear antenna arrays (LAA). The objective is to produce as close to desired radiation pattern as possible that exhibits sidelobe level (SLL) suppression. The PSO algorithm can be successfully used to locate the optimum element positions based on symmetric and even-element LAAs of isotropic radiators. The results obtained showed that the PSO algorithm is capable of flnding the optimal solution in most cases with superior performance over conventional method.