International Journal of Information Acquisition Vol. 8, No. 2 (2011) 171179 c World Scientic Publishing Company DOI: 10.

1142/S0219878911002422

SYNTHESIS OF UNIFORM LINEAR ANTENNA ARRAY USING GENETIC ALGORITHM WITH COST BASED ROULETTE TO MAXIMIZE SIDELOBE LEVEL REDUCTION
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T. S. JEYALI LASEETHA Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering HolyCross Engineering College Anna University of Technology, Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, India laseetha@gmail.com R. SUKANESH Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai Tamil Nadu, India drsukanesh@gmail.com Received 2 April 2011 Accepted 28 July 2011
This paper discusses the deployment of Genetic Algorithm optimization method for the synthesis of antenna array radiation pattern in adaptive beamforming. The synthesis problem discussed is to nd the weights of the Uniform Linear Antenna array elements that are optimum to provide the radiation pattern with maximum reduction in the sidelobe level. This technique proved its eectiveness in improving the performance of the antenna array. Keywords : Adaptive beamforming; sidelobe level; genetic algorithm; linear antenna array; pattern synthesis; convergence; array factor.

1. Introduction
Adaptive beamforming is a signal processing technique in which the electronically steerable antenna arrays are used to obtain maximum directivity towards signal of interest (SOI) and null formation towards signal of not interest (SNOI) that is, instead of a single antenna the antenna array can provide improved
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performance virtually in wireless communication. The characteristics of the antenna array can be controlled by the geometry of the element and array excitation. But sidelobe reduction in radiation pattern [Monzingo & Miller, 2003] should be performed to avoid degradation of total power eciency and the interference suppression [Panduro, 2006; Bevelacqua & Balanis, 2007]

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must be done to improve the Signal-toNoise plus interference ratio (SINR). Sidelobe reduction and interference suppression may be obtained using the following techniques: (1) amplitude-only control (2) phase-only control (3) position-only control and (4) complex weights (both amplitude and phase control). In this case, complex weights technique is the most ecient technique because it has greater degree of freedom for the solution space. On the other hand, it is the most expensive to implement in practice. Pattern synthesis is the process of choosing the antenna parameters to obtain desired radiation characteristics, such as the specic position of the nulls [Lu & Yeo, 2000], the desired sidelobe level [Basak et al., 2010] and beam width of antenna pattern. In literature, there are many works concerned with the synthesis of antenna array. It has a wide range of study from analytical methods to numerical methods and to optimization methods. Analytical studies by Stone who proposed binominal distribution, Dolph the DolphChebyshev amplitude distribution [Dolph, 1946], Taylor [1955], Elliot [1981], Villeneuve & Taylor [1984], Hansen & Woodyard [1938] and Bayliss [1938] have laid the strong foundation on antenna array synthesis. Iterative Numerical methods became popular in 1970s to shape the mainbeam. Today, a lot of research on antenna array evident in literature [Lu & Yeo, 2000; Panduro, 2006; Bevelacqua & Balanis, 2007; Basak et al., 2010; Blank, 2005; Chowdhry et al., 2010; Chen et al., 2005; Teruel, 2006; Blank, 2008 and Xia & Ghogho, 2008] is being carried out using various optimization techniques to solve electromagnetic problems due to their robustness and easy adaptivity. Among them is Genetic Algorithm. In this paper, it is assumed that the array is uniform, where all the antenna elements are identical and equally spaced. The design criterion considered is to minimize the sidelobe level [Basak et al., 2008] at a xed main beamwidth. Hence, the synthesis problem is in nding the weights that are optimum to provide the radiation pattern with maximum reduction in the sidelobe level.

2. Genetic Algorithms
Genetic Algorithms are a family of computational methods inspired by evolution [Holland, 1975; Goldberg, 1986; Goldberg & Holland, 1998]. A genetic algorithm (GA) is a procedure used to nd approximate solutions to search problems through techniques such as genetic inheritance, natural selection, mutation, and sexual reproduction (recombination, or crossover). Genetic Algorithms are typically implemented using computer simulations in which an optimization problem is specied. For this problem, members of a space of candidate solutions called individuals are represented using abstract representations called chromosomes. The GA consists of an iterative process that evolves a working set of individuals called a population toward an objective function, or tness function. Traditionally, solutions are represented using xed length strings, especially binary strings, but alternative encodings have been developed. Holland performed much of the foundational work in Genetic Algorithm during 1960 1970. His goal of understanding the processes of natural adaptation and designing biologicallyinspired articial systems led to the formulation of the simple genetic algorithm [Holland, 1975; Goldberg & Holland, 1998]. Haupt has done much research on electromagnetics and antenna arrays using Genetic Algorithm as reported [1986], [1994], [1995], [2003], [2004], [2007] and [2010]. The following parameters of GA decide the performance of optimization. Crossover exchange of genetic material (substrings) denoting rules, structural components, features of a machine learning, search, or optimization problem Selection the application of the tness criterion to choose which individuals from a population will go on to reproduce Reproduction the propagation of individuals from one generation to the next Mutation the modication of chromosomes for single individuals

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Synthesis of ULA Using Genetic Algorithm

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3. Model of an Antenna Array

An incident plane wave causes a linear gradient time delay between the antenna elements that is proportional to the angle of incidence. This time delay along the array manifests as a progressive phase shift between the elements when it is projected onto the sinusoidal carrier frequency. In the special case of normal incidence of the plane wave, all the antennas receive exactly the same signal, with no time delay or phase shift. In this work, the antenna elements are assumed to be uniformly spaced, in a straight line along the y -axis, and N is always the total number of elements in the antenna array. The physical separation distance is d, and the wave number of the carrier signal is k = 2/. The product kd is then the separation between the antennas in radians. When kd is equal to (or d = /2), the antenna array has maximum gain with the greatest angular accuracy with no grating lobes. The phase shift between the elements experienced by the plane wave is kd cos and is measured from the y -axis, starting from the rst antenna, as shown in Fig. 1. Weights can be applied to the individual antenna signals before the array factor (AF) is formed to control the direction of the main beam. This corresponds to a multiple-input-single-output (MISO) system. The total AF is just the sum of the individual signals, given in Eq. (1)
N N

The factor K = (n kd cos + n ) is the phase dierence. Final simplication of Eq. (1) is by conversion to phasor notation. Only the magnitude of the AF in any direction is important. The absolute phase has no bearing on the transmitted or received signal. Therefore, only the relative phases of the individual antenna signals are important in calculating the AF. Any signal component that is common to all of the antennas has no eect on the magnitude of the AF.

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4. Problem Formulation
Consider an array of antenna consisting of N number of elements. It is assumed that the antenna elements are symmetric about the center of the linear array. The far eld array factor of this array with an even number of isotropic elements (2N) can be expressed in Eq. (2) as AF ( ) = 2 an cos 2 dn sin n=1
N

(2)

where an is the amplitude of the nth element, is the angle from broadside and dn is the distance between position of the nth element and the array center. The main objective of this work is to nd an appropriate set of required element amplitude an that achieves interference suppression with maximum sidebobe level reduction. To nd a set of values which produces the array pattern, the algorithm is used to minimize the following cost function as given in Eq. (3)
90

AF =
n=1

En

=
n=1

ejKn .

(1) Cf =

W ( )[Fo ( ) Fd ( )],
=90

(3)

where Fo ( ) is the pattern obtained using our algorithm and Fd ( ) is the pattern desired. Here, it is taken to be the Chebychev pattern with SLL of 13 dB and W ( ) is the weight vector to control the sidelobe level in the cost function. The value of cost function is to be selected based on experience and knowledge.

5. Roulette Wheel Selection

In this paper, the following parameters are dened as maxgen = 500, maxfun = 1000 and mincost = 50 dB. Population is generated

Fig. 1.

Antenna Array

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randomly. Then it is sorted based on its cost minimum sidelobe level. For choosing mates for reproduction, Roulette wheel selection is used. Each weight vector is assigned a probability of selection on the basics of either its rank in the sorted population or its cost. Rank order selection is the easiest implementation of roulette wheel selection. Figure 2 shows the Roulette wheel selection probabilities for ve parents in the mating pool. The chromosome with low sidelobe level has higher percent chance of being selected than the chromosomes with higher side lobe level. In this case, rst or the best weight vector has a 27% chance of being selected. As more generations are added, the percent chance of weight vector being selected changes. Figure 3 shows the Roulette wheel selection for seven parents in the mating pool. The best weight vector has 33% chance of being selected. The roulette wheel selection needs to
9%

be computed only once, because the number of parents in the mating pool remains constant from generation to generation.

6. Results and Discussion

The antenna model consists of N elements equally spaced with distance of separation d = 0.5 along the y -axis. In our investigation, there is an array of 8, 16, 20 and 24 elements. Small number of elements is preferred in this work. The selection of number of elements depends on the designers choice based on the cost, size, aperture of the antenna, and speed of convergence. As the number of elements increases, the cost increases. Aperture increases and the performance gets improved. But law of diminishing returns is applicable due to the adaptive nature of mobile communication systems. The fast changing nature of the channel needs sucient data samples to retrieve undistorted signal with quick convergence. But low sample support will only be available. If large number of elements is used with low sample support, the convergence will be slow resulting in poor performance. Hence, we preferred to have 824 elements. Voltage sources are at the center segment of each element and the amplitude of the voltage level is the antenna element weight. Only the voltage applied to the element is changed to nd the optimum amplitude distribution, while the

20%

27%

22%

22%

Fig. 2. Roulette wheel probabilities for ve parents in the mating pool.

-5

33% 4% 7% 1% |AF| 25% 18%

-10

-15

12%

-20

-25

-30 -1

-0.8

-0.6

-0.4

-0.2

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

Fig. 3. Roulette wheel probabilities for seven parents in the mating pool.

Fig. 4. Optimized radiation pattern with reduced side lobe level of 16.1 dB for N = 8 elements.

Synthesis of ULA Using Genetic Algorithm

-12 -13 -14 -15 -16 cost -17 -18 -19 -20 -21

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-22

10

20

30

40

50 60 generation

70

80

90

100

and after eight iterations, it reaches 18.8 dB and after 43 generations, it converges to a maximum reduction of 21.3 dB. Figure 6 shows the optimized radiation pattern with relative sidelobe level of 15 dB with N = 16 and Fig. 8 shows its convergence curve. The convergence curve shows that it converges to 19.3 dB after 54 generations. Changing the number of elements causes the contiguous GA to get dierent optimum weights. The array patterns for N = 8, 16, 20 and 24 are shown in Fig. 7. Figure 9 shows the convergence to 19.4 dB for N = 20 elements. Figure 10 shows the optimized radiation pattern with relative sidelobe level of
Radiation Pattern with reduces sidelobe level N=24,20,16 and 8 elements 0 N=24 N=20 N=16 N=8

Fig. 5. Convergence of sidelobe level with respect to evolving generations for N = 8 elements.

array geometry and elements remain constant. A continuous GA with a population size of 10 and a mutation rate of 0.35 is run for a total of 500 generations using MATLAB and the best result is found for each iteration. The cost function is the minimum sidelobe level for the antenna pattern. Figure 4 shows that the antenna array with N = 8 elements has been normalized for a gain of 0 dB along the angle 0 and the maximum relative sidelobe level of 16.1 dB. Figure 5 shows the convergence of the algorithm for maximum reduction in the relative sidelobe level with N = 8 elements. It starts from 13 dB which is the optimized value of Chebychev pattern for the RSLL
0

-5

-10

|AF|

-15

-20

-25

-30 -1

-0.8

-0.6

-0.4

-0.2

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

Fig. 7. The optimized radiation pattern with reduced sidelobe level for N = 8, 16, 20 and 24.

-13

-5

-14

-10

-15

|AF|

-16

-15

cost -17 -18 -19

-20

-25

-30 -1

-0.8

-0.6

-0.4

-0.2

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

-20 0

10

20

30

40

50 60 generation

70

80

90

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Fig. 6. Optimized radiation pattern with reduced sidelobe level of 15 dB for N = 16 elements.

Fig. 8. Convergence of sidelobe level with respect to evolving generations for N = 16 elements.

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-13

-14

-15
-15

-16 cost
cost -16

-17

-18

-17

-19

-18

-20 0

10

20

30

40

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50 60 generation

70

80

90

100

-19

10

20

30

40

50 60 generation

70

80

90

100

Fig. 9. Convergence of sidelobe level with respect to evolving generations for N = 20 elements.

Fig. 11. Convergence of sidelobe level with respect to evolving generations for N = 24 elements.
0

-5

-5
-10

-10

|AF|

|AF|

-15

-15

-20

-20
-25

-25
-30 -1 -0.8 -0.6 -0.4 -0.2 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1

-30

-1

-0.8

-0.6

-0.4

-0.2

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

Fig. 10. The optimized radiation pattern with reduced sidelobe level for number of elements N = 20.

Fig. 12. The optimized radiation pattern with reduced sidelobe level for number of elements N = 24.

18.7 dB with N = 20. The performance comparison among N = 8, 16, 20, and 24 are tabulated below in Table 1. This clearly shows that N = 20 performed well in terms of minimum
Table 1. Performance comparison of antenna array with dierent number of elements. N 8 16 20 24

RSLL (dB) 16.1 15 18.7 14.97 Final Convergence (dB) 21.3 19.3 19.4 18.7 No. of generations 43 54 31 42

RSLL and minimum generations to converge with better SLL of 19.4 dB and thus it is selected as optimized element number. Figure 11 shows the convergence curve for N = 24 elements. Figure 12 shows the radiation pattern with RSLL of 14.97 dB, with N = 24 elements. Figure 13 shows the amplitude excitation for optimized antenna array as given in Table 2. The obtained costs are ranked from best to worst. The best among the suitable criteria is to select the bottom half and to keep the top half of the list. But in our program, the selection criteria is to discard any chromosome that has relative sidelobe level less than 15 dB.

Synthesis of ULA Using Genetic Algorithm Table 2. Amplitude excitation values for N = 20 elements corresponding to Fig. 13. Wn W1 W2 W3 W4 W5 W6 W7 W8 W9 W10 W11 W12 W13 W14 W15 W16 W17 W18 W19 W20 Amplitude 0.90287 0.9645 0.7259 0.6910 0.7026 0.9491 0.7789 0.3478 0.5097 0.6319 0.5358 0.5625 0.4696 0.4828 0.2411 0.5464 0.0060 0.1060 0.4043 0.4334
amplitude distribution weight vector for N = 20 elements 1 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0

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10 elements

15

20

25

Fig. 13. Amplitude distribution for optimized antenna array with N = 20 elements.

(2)

Table 3 shows the cost function relative to the population that has a SLL less than 15 dB. Among the 10 populations presented, only ve are selected. This limitation speeds up the convergence of the algorithm. After this natural selection, the chromosomes mate to produce osprings. Once paired, the ospring consists of genetic material from both parents. Mating takes place by pairing the surviving chromosome. The Genetic Algorithm has many variables to control and trade-os to consider which are given below as: (1) Number of Chromosomes and initial random Population: more number of chromosomes provide better sampling number and
Table 3. Index 1 2 4 7 5 0.893 0.893 0.463 0.893 0.837 0.909 0.765 0.765 0.765 0.427

(3) (4)

(5)

(6)

solution space but at the cost of slow convergence. Generating the random list, the type of probability distribution and weighting of the parameters have a signicant impact on the convergence time. Selection criteria decides which chromosome to discard. Crossover technique: the chromosomes selected for mating, may be paired using any one method. That is, from top to bottom randomly, or from best to worst. Mutation rate: It is selected to mutate a particular chromosome. Mutate does not permit the algorithm to get stuck at local minimum. Stopping Criteria: Generally, is based on any one of the following criteria such as the maximum number of generations, the maximum number of function calls and the minimum cost.

Population and respective cost function values. Relative sidelobe level (dB) 0.264 0.741 0.741 0.741 0.964 0.223 0.205 0.205 0.205 0.305 26.968 19.086 18.204 17.555 17.517

Chromosome (weight vector) 0.795 0.598 0.633 0.871 0.782 0.716 0.531 0.539 0.430 0.532 0.588 0.929 0.929 0.929 0.542 0.372 0.721 0.259 0.259 0.823

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7. Conclusion
In this paper, Genetic Algorithm is used to obtain minimum sidelobe level relative to the main beam on both sides of 0 using cost-based Roulette Wheel selection. The uniqueness of the Genetic Algorithm is that it can optimize a large number of discrete parameters. Genetic Algorithm is an intellectual algorithm which searches for the optimum element weight of the array antenna. This paper demonstrates the dierent ways to apply Genetic Algorithm by varying the number of elements to optimize the array pattern. The best result of convergence to a minimum of 21.3 dB is obtained, which proved the eectiveness of cost-based GA algorithm. The synthesis problem can be further investigated with dierent population size, mutation rate, number of generations and selection and elitism. Adaptive mutation can also be deployed and investigated.

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Biography
T. S. Jeyali Laseetha is currently working as Professor in the Department of Electronics and Communication Department in Holycross Engineering College, Vagaikulam, Anna University of Technology, Tirunelveli, Tamilnadu, INDIA. She received her graduate degree from Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai and M.E. from Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli. She is now pursuing her Ph.D. degree under the supervision of Dr. (Mrs.) R. Sukanesh on beamforming. She has 19 years of teaching experience. She has published many research articles in international journals and also presented papers in national and international conferences. She is a member of IEEE and life member of ISTE and IE (India). R. Sukanesh is the Professor of Electronics and Communication Engineering Department in Thiagarajar college of Engineering, Madurai, Tamilnadu, India. She was graduated from GCT, Coimbatore in 1982 and M.E. from PSG college of Engineering & Technology in 1985 and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Madurai Kamaraj University in 1999. Her research interests are Bio-medical Engineering, Neural Networks, and Wireless Communication. She has published more than 85 research articles and presented more than 100 papers in National & International Conferences. She chaired many sessions too. She is a fellow of IE (India), life member of Bio-Medical Society of India, Indian Association of Bio-Medical scientists and ISTE.