Efficient analysis of large aperiodic antenna arrays using the domain green's function method

Abstract

An efficient method-of-moments (MoM) based domain decomposition technique, viz., the domain Green's function method (DGFM), is presented for analyzing large antenna arrays. The DGFM is a perturbation technique where mutual coupling between array elements is accounted for during the formulation of an active impedance matrix for each domain/array element. The active current distribution on the entire array geometry is obtained by solving the smaller matrix equations related to the elements, and not that of the problem as a whole. This leads to a significant saving in both runtime and memory usage. The method also takes into account the edge effects attributed to the finite size of the array, complex excitations with nonlinear phase shift and is not limited to periodic array configurations. The DGFM is an approximation and assumes a slowly varying current distribution between domains. A novel way to mitigate the aforementioned, by including secondary coupling effects, is also discussed. Furthermore, an efficient active impedance matrix fill strategy is presented where the active impedance matrix summation is truncated to include only a certain number of terms. Parallelization using both distributed and shared memory programming models have also been applied to the DGFM, to further optimize runtime and memory usage. © 1963-2012 IEEE.