An Off-grid Compressive Sensing Strategy for the Subarray Synthesis of Non-uniform Linear Arrays

Abstract: With the increasing popularity of large-scale antenna arrays, the subarraying technology becomes more attractive. In this paper, we propose two effective subarraying methods right after formulating the subarray synthesis as a compressive sensing (CS) problem: i) Orthogonal matching pursuit based subarray synthesis (OMP-SS), a common CS approach which can be used for the subarray synthesis to attain the subarray information (the subarray number, the number of elements per subarray and corresponding excitation coeffcients) and ii) Off-grid orthogonal matching pursuit based subarray synthesis (OGOMP-SS), an advanced approach for optimizing antenna elements positions and the subarray information mentioned above simultaneously. In addition, two user-defined modes are designed for different application scenarios, wherein, mode-1 is to optimize the pattern synthesis performance for the given the number of subarrays, and mode-2 is to obtain the minimum number of subarrays for the cases when the pattern synthsis accuracy is satisfied. Finally, our simulation results reveal that it is of paramount significance to optimize antenna elements positions for the subarray synthesis performance on the one hand and demonstrate the excellent performances of proposed schemes in comparison with other competitive state-of-the-art subarray synthesis methods on the other hand.