Design of a Dual-Band, Switched-Beam Dipole Array, with Elements Failure Correction

Switched-beam arrays (SBAs) are considered to be attractive alternatives to fully adaptive arrays (mainly due to deployment and maintenance cost) and can be used in order to increase system capacity and spectral efficiency. In this paper, dual-band operation and array failure correction of switched beam dipole arrays are considered. Dual-band operation is needed in a growing number of telecommunications systems (e.g. GSM900/1800, or WiFi/WiMAX), while array failure needs to be corrected remotely in cases of base station or satellite antennas. A genetic-algorithm based technique is proposed, and the design of a dual-band antenna array, with the ability to remain fully functional after one element failure, is presented. To the best of our knowledge, a joint design technique for dual-band operation and element failure correction is not present in open literature. The suitability of the proposed array is demonstrated via numerical results.