Sparse Active Rectangular Array with Few Closely Spaced Elements

Sparse sensor arrays offer a cost effective alternative to uniform arrays. By utilizing the co-array, a sparse array can match the performance of a filled array, despite having significantly fewer sensors. However, even sparse arrays can have many closely spaced elements, which may deteriorate the array performance in the presence of mutual coupling. This paper proposes a novel sparse planar array configuration with few unit inter-element spacings. This Concentric Rectangular Array (CRA) is designed for active sensing tasks, such as microwave or ultrasound imaging, in which the same elements are used for both transmission and reception. The properties of the CRA are compared to two well-known sparse geometries: the Boundary Array and the Minimum-Redundancy Array (MRA). Numerical searches reveal that the CRA is the MRA with the fewest unit element displacements for certain array dimensions.