Scalable and Adaptive Electrical State Coordination for Distributed Phased Arrays
Abstract
Transmission of high-power microwave energy is becoming increasingly important for a range of wireless applications. Greater power density at an intended destination translates to improved throughput in communications systems and greater sensing performance, among other benefits. Traditional approaches have focused on increasing the power generation capabilities at the platform level, throughmeans like high-power microwave sources, high-gain transmitters, and antenna apertures capable of handling significant power levels. Complementary to this single-platform approach is scalability, where multiple transmitters are aggregated to increase the total power at the destination. While aggregation can also be implemented at the platform level in static arrays, distributed aggregation between separate systems holds the potential for substantial power scalability. Implemented coherently at the level of the RF wavelength, significant increases in transmit power can be achieved in distributed phased arrays. The transmit power in such a system increases by the number of sources N and by beam focusing, yielding an ideal increase of N2 at the destination, which is far greater than incoherent operation for even a small number of platforms. Combined with traditional single-platform power improvements, distributedphase-coherent coordination holds the potential for improvements in transmit signal power that are otherwise unachievable. Whereas other distributed beamforming approaches have been based on closed-loop coordination, where signals from the destination provide information about the beamforming state, such approaches are not feasible for sensing applications where such feedback is not reliably available. We thus focus on open-loop coordination approaches, where the nodes in a distributed array self-align their spatioelectrical states. This allows the system to arbitrarily steer beams to any desired angle. Our research group has been pioneering efforts in distributed phased array technologies for more than ten years. Through these efforts we have developed some of the most advanced microwave wireless coordination techniques and demonstrated numerous open-loop distributed beamforming systems. Our previous work has focused principally on coordinating the phase, frequency, and time between nodes in a distributed array, successfully addressing the challenges of coordinating the electrical states of the nodes to support distributed beamforming. These prior efforts have addressed errors due to system electronics and relative positioning of the elements in the array, however there remains a significant number of challenges before distributed beamforming systems can be feasibly implemented in practical systems. This effort will focus on two of the most important next-stage challenges in distributed phased array development: the implementation of scalable coordinationapproaches in a large networked system to demonstrate the feasibility of scaling the transmit power in practical hardware; and developing adaptive coordination techniques to overcome environmental degradations such as internode channel dynamics and multipath interference. The main objectives of this effort are to develop and explore decentralized and adaptive coordination algorithms for distributed beamforming in experimental systems, determine the limits of scalability, and uncover any unknown challenges to future scalability. To accomplish this, we will develop two novel distributed phased array experimental systems that are each focused on addressing the above next-stage challenges.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Apr 10, 2025
- Source ID
- N000142512208
Entities
People
- Jeffrey A. Nanzer
Organizations
- Michigan State University
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy