Research Information System
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ELECTRONICS, vol.112, no.6, pp.1152-1169, 2025 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus)
Thinned concentric circular antenna arrays (CCAAs) are crucial in modern wireless communication systems. CCAAs are widely used for efficient communication, directivity, and beamforming capabilities. Nevertheless, CCAAs encounter a challenge of radiation patterns characterised by high sidelobe levels (SLL). Designing thinned CCAAs to surmount this limitation for optimal performance can be complex and challenging. This paper employs a mutation hill climber (MHC) algorithm to optimise the CCAA structure. The goal is to attain an optimal design that balances the number of switched-on elements and reduces the maximum SLL. The performance and efficacy of the MHC are examined using two different cases of thinned CCAA design: two-ring and ten-ring configurations. Simulation results reveal the superiority of the MHC over the latest binary metaheuristic techniques in achieving the lowest maximum SLL and the number of switched-on elements. For the two-ring thinned CCAA, the MHC effectively switched off 50 antenna elements, reducing the maximum SLL by 24.92 dB. Meanwhile, for the ten-ring thinned CCAA, the MHC reduced the number of switched-on antenna elements from 440 to 184, reducing the maximum SLL by 34.09 dB.