Reconfigurable Antenna Arrays with Phase-only Control in the Presence of Near-field Nulls

In this paper an effective iterative method is presented for the power synthesis of reconfigurable antenna arrays. The algorithm is suitable for arrays of arbitrary geometry, including the case where a large number of elements is involved. The reconfigurability is achieved by phase-only control, so that the excitation amplitude of each array element remains constant during the reconfiguration process. Such amplitudes may be different from one array element to the others, and they are not assigned a priori, but are optimized. Furthermore, the electric field is imposed to vanish in a number of prescribed points of the near-field region, so that a strong field reduction is obtained in a neighborhood of them.