Efficient Reconfigurable Microstrip Patch Antenna Modeling Exploiting Knowledge Based Artificial Neural Networks

Artificial neural network (ANN) is widely used for modeling and optimization in antenna design problems. It is a very convenient alternative for using computationally intensive 3D-Electromagnetic (EM) simulation in design. The reconfigurable microstrip patch antennas have been considered to ensure operational frequencies for different kind of purposes. ANN is used for modeling of antenna design problems to obtain a surrogate based model instead of a computationally intensive 3D-EM simulation. Further improvement in modeling, a prior knowledge about the problem such as an empirical formula, an equivalent circuit model, and a semi-analytical equation is directly embedded in ANN structure through a knowledge based modeling technique. Knowledge based techniques are developed to improve some properties of conventional ANN modeling such as accuracy and data requirement. All these improvements ensure better accuracy compared to conventional ANN modeling. The necessary knowledge can be obtained by the coarse model which is a complex 3D-EM simulation in terms of grid size selection. Knowledge based techniques can improve the performance of conventional ANN through the guidance of the coarse model. As long as the coarse model approximates to the computationally intensive 3D-EM simulation, the performance of the knowledge based surrogate model can converge to the design targets. The efficiency of modeling strategies is demonstrated by a reconfigurable 5-fingers microstrip patch antenna. The antenna has four modes of operation, which are controlled by two PIN diode switches with ON/OFF states, and it resonates at multiple frequencies between 1 and 7 GHz. The number of training data is changed in terms of selected parameters from the design space. Three different sets are used to show modeling performance according to the size of training data. The simulation results show that knowledge based neural networks ensure considerable savings in computational costs as compared to the computationally intensive 3D-EM simulation while maintaining the accuracy of the fine model.