A Flexible Phased-MIMO Array Antenna with Transmit Beamforming

Although phased-array antennas have been widely employed in modern radars, the requirements of many emerging applications call for new more advanced array antennas. This paper proposes a flexible phased-array multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) array antenna with transmit beamforming. This approach divides the transmit antenna array into multiple subarrays that are allowed to overlap each subarray coherently transmits a distinct waveform, which is orthogonal to the waveforms transmitted by other subarrays, at a distinct transmit frequency. That is, a small frequency increment is employed in each subarray. Each subarray forms a directional beam and all beams may be steered to different directions. The subarrays jointly offer flexible operating modes such as MIMO array which offers spatial diversity gain, phased-array which offers coherent directional gain and frequency diverse array which provides range-dependent beampattern. The system performance is examined by analyzing the transmit-receive beampatterns. The proposed approach is validated by extensive numerical simulation results.