Thinning a Subset of Selected Elements for Null Steering Using Binary Genetic Algorithm

Generally, the null steering is performed by controlling the amplitude and/or phase weightings of all element excitations or only a small number of them. In such cases, a need for extra RF components such as variable attenuators and variable phase shifters with each element in the array is inevitable. In this paper, an alternative method is introduced where the null steering is performed by thinning (or turning off) only a small subset of the elements in the uniform linear arrays. To find an optimum combination of active (on) and inactive (off) elements, a binary genetic algorithm is used. In large arrays, the number of required nulls is much smaller than the total number of array elements, thus only a small subset of the array elements could be sufficient for producing the required nulls rather than optimizing all the array elements. By this way, a faster convergence speed of the optimizer and lowest peak sidelobe level can be obtained. The effectiveness of the proposed method with various subset configurations will be demonstrated and compared with some standard null steering methods.