Sidelobe Reductions of Antenna Arrays via an Improved Chicken Swarm Optimization Approach

Antenna arrays are able to improve the directivity performance and reduce the cost of wireless communication systems. However, how to reduce the maximum sidelobe level (SLL) of the beam pattern is a key problem in antenna arrays. In this paper, three kinds of antenna arrays that are linear antenna array (LAA), circular antenna array (CAA) and random antenna array (RAA) are investigated. First, we formulate the SLL suppression optimization problems of LAA, CAA and RAA, respectively. Then, we propose a novel method called improved chicken swarm optimization (ICSO) approach to solve the formulated optimization problems. ICSO introduces four enhanced strategies including the local search factor, weighting factor and global search factor into the update method of conventional chicken swarm optimization (CSO) algorithm, respectively, for achieving better beam pattern optimization results of antenna arrays. Moreover, a variation mechanism is proposed to enhance the population diversity so that further improving the performance of the algorithm. We conduct simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed ICSO for the maximum SLL suppressions of LAAs, CAAs and RAAs, and the results show that ICSO obtains lower maximum SLLs for different antenna array cases with different numbers of antenna elements compared to several other algorithms.