V.I. Djigan

Institute for Design Problems in Microelectronics of RAS (Zelenograd, Moscow, Russia)

Formulation of the problem. Antenna arrays are widely used as the directional antennas of the different radio systems today. Most of the algorithms of such antenna control assume the ideal model of the antenna with the same electrical characteristics of its channels. However, the same characteristics of the channels cannot be ensured due to the variation in the characteristics of the radio-frequency components used in the manufacturing of the arrays, due to inaccurate installation of these components, due to design constraints and others. Therefore, in most cases, after the manufacturing of the antenna arrays, it is necessary to adjust the radio frequency units. Manual tuning is an expensive and time consuming procedure. It also cannot be used during the operation of antenna arrays if the characteristics of its components are changed due to the changes in ambient temperature or supply voltages. At the same time, any antenna array has the discrete phase shifters with the external digital control in each channel. These phase shifters can be used not only to control the beam of an antenna array, but also to compensate the variation of the phase characteristics of its channels. Estimation and compensation of the variation is called calibration.

Target. This paper considers a new phase-less algorithm of the antenna array calibration. The algorithm allows to estimate and compensate the relative signal phase lags in the array channels. This includes the phase lags, caused by the variation of the electrical characteristics of the channel radio frequency components of the antenna array and the spatial phase lags caused by the mutual spatial location of the measuring signal source and the receiving array or the measuring receiver and the transmitting array. The estimated phase lag compensation is provided by means of the phase-shifters, which are the essential parts of the antenna arrays. The compensation means the array calibration and the beam steering simultaneously.

Results. The algorithm does not require the access to the array channel signals and uses only the measurements of the array output power. The proposed algorithm requires 4+4(M-1) of such measurements after the changing of the channel signal phases to the specific values in the reference and calibrated channels, using the phase-shifters. Here, M is the number of the array channels. The proposed algorithm requires about 33% less power measurements comparing to the similar algorithm, which requires 2+6(M-1) of such measurements. The accuracy of the phase estimation using the proposed and the known calibration algorithm is the same. It does not exceed a phase discrete, which corresponds the least significant bit of the discrete phase-shifters.

Practical significance. The proposed algorithm can be used in the receiving or in the transmitting array of an arbitrary geometric configuration after the array manufacturing or during its field operation.

Djigan V.I. Phase-less algorithm for antenna array calibration, optimized with the required number of its output power measurements. Radiotekhnika. 2022. V. 86. № 6. P. 80−95. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18127/j00338486-202206-12 (In Russian)

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