Optimal polarized beampattern synthesis using a vector antenna array

Using polarized waveforms increases the capacity of communication systems and improves the performance of active sensing systems such as radar. We consider the optimal synthesis of a directional beam with full polarization control using an array of electromagnetic vector antennas (EMVA). In such an array, each antenna consists of p ≥ 2 orthogonal electric or magnetic dipole elements. The control of polarization and spatial power patterns is achieved through carefully designing the amplitudes and phases of the weights of these dipole antennas. We formulate the problem in a convex form, which is thus efficiently solvable by existing solvers such as the interior point method. Our results indicate that vector antenna arrays not only enable full polarization control of the beampattern, but also improve the power gain of the main beam (over the sidelobes), where the gain is shown numerically to be linearly proportional to vector antenna dimensionality p. This implies that EMVA not only offers the freedom to control the beampattern polarization, but also virtually increases the array size by exploiting the full electromagnetic (EM) field components. We also study the effect of polarization on the spatial power pattern. Our analysis shows that for arrays consisting of pairs of electrical and magnetic dipoles, the spatial power pattern is independent of the mainbeam polarization constraint.