Design of a Fully Digital Controlled Reconfigurable Switched Beam Concentric Ring Array Antenna Using Firefly and Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm

Reconfigurable antenna arrays are often capable of radiating multiple patterns by modifying the excitation phases of the elements. In this paper a method based on Firefly Algorithm (FA) has been proposed to obtain dual radiation pattern from a concentric ring array of isotropic elements, by finding out two different combinations of states for the switches, which are assumed to be connected with the rings of the array, along with optimum set of 4-bit radial amplitude and 5-bit radial phase distributions of the array elements for the specific switch combinations. The optimum excitations of the array elements in terms of discrete amplitudes and discrete phase, and the different switch combinations for the specific excitations are computed using Firefly Algorithm. To illustrate the effectiveness of Firefly Algorithm, the two beam pairs have been computed by the same procedure from the same array, using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm, without changing their design criteria. Results clearly show the superiority of the Firefly Algorithm over Particle Swarm Optimization to handle the proposed problem.