Work

Dimensionality reduced antenna array for beamforming/steering

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Targeted communication is made possible using beamforming. It is extensively employed in many disciplines involving electromagnetic waves, including arrayed ultrasonic, optical, and high-speed wireless communication. Conventional beam steering often requires the addition of separate active amplitude and phase control units after each radiating element. The high-power consumption and complexity of large-scale phased arrays can be overcome by reducing the number of active controllers, pushing beamforming into satellite communications and deep space exploration. To address this, we propose a phased array antenna design based on dimensionality-reduced cascaded angle offset phased array (DRCAO-PAA). By applying singular value decomposition (SVD) to compress the coefficient matrix of phase shifts, our method reduces the number of active controllers while maintaining beam-steering performance. Furthermore, the suggested DRCAO-PAA was sing the singular value deposition concept. For practical application the particle swarm optimization algorithm and deep neural network Transformer were adopted. Based on this theoretical framework, an experimental board was built to verify the theory. Finally, the 16/8/4 -array beam steering was demonstrated by using 4/3/2 active controllers, respectively. Shiyi Xia and Mingyang Zhao, et al propose a dimensionality-reduced phased-array antenna that uses mathematical compression to cut the number of active controllers by up to 87%. This advance enables simpler, lower-cost beam-steering systems for future 6 G and satellite communications.

Source: Communications Engineering

DOI: 10.1038/s44172-026-00588-6