Reconfigurable Linear Antenna Arrays for Beam-Pattern Matching in Collocated MIMO Radars

Beam-pattern matching plays an important role in multiple-input multiple-output radars. In the vast majority of research done in this area, the aim is to find the covariance matrix of the waveforms fed into the transmit array. Also, reconfiguring a preset array of antennas (antenna selection), which means turning off some of the antennas in the array, is an effective technique to reach the desired beam patterns, dynamically. In this article, we introduce a novel multistep method to implement this reconfiguration technique to a uniform linear array. In each step, by exploiting the relation between the diagonal elements of a covariance matrix resulted from solving a beam-pattern matching problem and the transmitted power of the antennas, we find the least important antenna of the array and turn it off accordingly. Then, we repeat this process until a predefined number of antennas remains. Our proposed method outperforms its counterparts in the literature in terms of beam-pattern matching as well as computational complexity, which makes it an appropriate method for real-time applications. Simulations are used to show the validity and superiority of the proposed method.