Planar Array Diagnostic Tool for Millimeter-Wave Wireless Communication Systems

Abstract

In this paper, a diagnostic tool or procedure based on Bayesian compressive sensing (BCS) is proposed for identification of failed element(s) which manifest in millimeter-wave planar antenna arrays. With adequate a priori knowledge of the reference antenna array radiation pattern, a diagnostic problem of faulty elements was formulated. Sparse recovery algorithms, including total variation (TV), mixed ℓ 1 / ℓ 2 norm, and minimization of the ℓ 1 , are readily available in the literature, and were used to diagnose the array under test (AUT) from measurement points, consequently providing faster and better diagnostic schemes than the traditional mechanisms, such as the back propagation algorithm, matrix method algorithm, etc. However, these approaches exhibit some drawbacks in terms of effectiveness and reliability in noisy data, and a large number of measurement data points. To overcome these problems, a methodology based on BCS was adapted in this paper. From far-field radiation pattern samples, planar array diagnosis was formulated as a sparse signal recovery problem where BCS was applied to recover the locations of the faults using relevance vector machine (RVM). The resulted BCS approach was validated through simulations and experiments to provide suitable guidelines for users, as well as insight into the features and potential of the proposed procedure. A Ka-band ( 28.9   GHz ) 10 × 10 rectangular microstrip patch antenna array that emulates failure with zero excitation was designed for far-field measurements in an anechoic chamber. Both simulated and measured far-field samples were used to test the proposed approach. The proposed technique is demonstrated to detect diagnostic problems with fewer measurements provided the prior knowledge of the array radiation pattern is known, and the number of faults is relatively smaller than the array size. The effectiveness and reliability of the technique is verified experimentally and via simulation. In addition to a faster diagnosis and better reconstruction accuracy, the BCS-based technique shows more robustness to additive noisy data compared to other compressive sensing methods. The proposed procedure can be applied to next-generation transceivers, aerospace systems, radar systems, and other communication systems.