Improved Artificial Bee Colony for Design of a Reconfigurable Antenna Array with Discrete Phase Shifters

Multi-beam antenna arrays have important applications in the field of communications and radar. The reconfigurable design problem is to find the element in a sector pattern main beam with side lobes. The same excitation amplitudes applied to the array with zero-phase should be in a high directivity, low side lobe pencil shaped main beam. This paper presents a new method of designing a reconfigurable antenna with quantized phase excitations using an improved artificial bee colony, called IABC. Compared with subsequent quantization, experimental results indicate that the performance of the discrete realization of the phase-excitation value can be improved.