Design of a grating lobe mitigated antenna array architecture integrated with low loss PCB filtering structures

Abstract: Massive multiple input multiple output - MIMO systems are a reality and modern communication systems rely upon this technology to cope with the increasing need for capacity and network usage. Antenna arrays are at the heart of the of the massive-MIMO system and are the enabling technology. The defining cost of such a system is the number of transmit receive ports TRx as they dictate the number of control points and the associated digital control computational capacity. Typically users are spread along the azimuth and there is limited angular user spread along elevation. This enables us to group the elements in elevation which of course limits the elevation scanning performance. The element grouping result in grating lobes when we do elevation scanning. In the newly introduced frequency range 3 - FR3 in the envisioned 6G communication systems that is from 6-20 GHz it will not be allowed to transmit power above the horizon and the resulting grating lobes from the standard grouping should be mitigated. This project is structured into two parts. In the first part a grating lobe mitigation technique based on irregular subarray grouping utilizing the wellknown Penrose irregular tessellation is developed. This tessellation is based into two geometrical shapes where when put together they can fully tile the space aperiodically. Introducing this apperiodicity the grating or quantization lobes of the array are mitigated. In addition, in the first part a beam forming algorithm is developed based on particle swarm optimization that is able to produce the optimal weights for the array steering as well as optimize some of the embedded patterns of the irregular grouping. The last optimization step of the irregular subarray patterns is utilized only when the grouping results in a narrow pattern in azimuth and as a result we have static single port beamforming networks. This of course is a trade off between the broadside gain and the azimuth steerability of the array. In the second part of this thesis two low loss band pass filters have been developed with a PCB integrated suspended stripline techology. The filters were optimised for the frequencies within FR3. The resulted filtering structures can further be integrated at the input port of the proposed feeding network with the same technology. The two parts of this thesis target to introduce on one hand a antenna array architecture with subarray groupings that produce no grating lobes and on the other hand the proposed filtering structures have small enough dimensions to fit within the subarray footprint.