Abstract

Using polarized waveforms increases the capacity of communication
systems and improves the performance of active sensing systems. We
consider the optimal synthesis of a directional beam with full
polarization control using an array of electromagnetic vector
antennas (EMVA). In such an array, each antenna consists of $p\ge 2$
orthogonal electric or magnetic dipole elements. The control of
polarization and spatial power patterns is achieved through
carefully designing the amplitudes and phases of the weights of
these dipole antennas. We formulate the problem in a convex form,
which is thus efficiently solvable by existing solvers such as the
interior point method. Our results indicate that vector antenna
arrays not only enable full polarization control of the beampattern,
but also improve the power gain of the main beam (over the
sidelobes), where the gain is shown to be linearly proportional to
vector antenna dimensionality $p$. This implies that EMVA not only
offers the freedom to control the beampattern polarization, but also
virtually increases the array size by exploiting the full
electromagnetic (EM) field components.