Optimizing the Information- Theoretic Partitioning of Simultaneous Transmit and Receive Phased Arrays

Phased array technology has progressed towards fully digital architectures over recent years. This has significantly increased the agility of phased arrays, which in turn has created a need to determine how to optimally configure these arrays for dynamic missions. Previous work on assigning signals to antennas in phased arrays has focused on minimizing measures of the sidelobes in the beam patterns produced by thinning or interleaving the array using genetic algorithms (GAs). This work explores a novel application of the GA to optimize the resolution of a narrowband imaging array with respect to the transmit/receive antenna partition when considering self-interference in a simultaneous-transmit-and-receive operation. The results demonstrate the GA's effectiveness at finding optimal or near-optimal array partitions without exhaustively exploring the impractically large search space.