A Study on Propagation of Frequency Diverse Array in Multipath Environments

Frequency Diverse Arrays are gaining interest for radar and wireless power transfer applications. Their capabilities to focus the field in a desired area is an interesting property in order to mitigate interference or enhance communications privacy. However, their current applications rely mostly on ideal free space propagation conditions, without considering the effect of multipath propagation in a real environment. In this work, Frequency Diverse Array characteristics and focus capability in real scenarios are primarily investigated through Ray Tracing simulations. Surprisingly, results show an overall fair resistance against multipath thanks to a sort of spatial diversity of the array elements, even though the field distribution undergoes clear spatial fluctuations triggered by multipath interference.