Directivity Enhancement of Movable Antenna Arrays with Mutual Coupling
This work addresses the challenge of improving beamforming gain in antenna arrays for applications like wireless communications, representing an incremental advance by optimizing antenna positions to harness mutual coupling.
The paper tackles the problem of enhancing antenna array directivity by exploiting mutual coupling effects in movable antenna arrays, proposing a low-complexity algorithm (GS-GD) that achieves significant directivity gains compared to conventional uniform linear arrays, with numerical results showing it approaches the global optimum closely in most directions.
In conventional antenna arrays, mutual coupling between antenna elements is often regarded as detrimental. However, under specific conditions, it can be harnessed to enhance the far-field directivity (i.e., beamforming gain). Theoretically, the directivity of an N-antenna superdirective array over the endfire direction can reach N^{2}, significantly exceeding the directivity of a traditional uncoupled array which is N over all directions. This paper investigates the potential of mutual coupling effects in movable antenna (MA) arrays for directivity enhancement. A low-complexity algorithm called Greedy Search and Gradient Descent (GS-GD) is proposed to optimize the antenna positions for maximizing the array directivity over any given direction, where the antenna positions are first selected sequentially from discrete grid points and then continuously refined through gradient descent (GD) optimization. Numerical results demonstrate that the optimized MA array design by exploiting the antenna coupling achieves significant directivity gains compared to the conventional uniform linear array (ULA) without antenna coupling over all directions. Additionally, the proposed GS-GD algorithm is shown to approach the global optimum closely in most directions.