Step-Up n-Port Networks

This paper presents a method of characterizing n-port networks. It is shown that a large class of lossless n-ports can be characterized by sequences of step-up vectors, i.e., vectors that form successive incident voltages to the networks and are orthonormal at the same time. As a result, lossless networks can be classified into several classes. The most interesting one is, perhaps, the step-up class, which is shown to behave jointly like a unitary operator and a complete step-up operator on separate subspaces of the space of L2 vectors.