Millimeter-Wave Antenna Array Diagnosis with Partial Channel State Information

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel remote array diagnosis method for millimeter-wave systems that requires only partial channel information, specifically angle-of-arrivals, making fault detection more practical and robust against estimation errors.

Contribution

It presents a new diagnostic technique that relaxes the need for full channel state information, using only angle-of-arrivals, and demonstrates improved robustness and efficiency.

Findings

Fault detection with partial CSI is comparable to full CSI methods.

The proposed method outperforms existing techniques under channel estimation errors.

Numerical results validate the effectiveness and robustness of the approach.

Abstract

Large antenna arrays enable directional precoding for Millimeter-Wave (mmWave) systems and provide sufficient link budget to combat the high path-loss at these frequencies. Due to atmospheric conditions and hardware malfunction, outdoor mmWave antenna arrays are prone to blockages or complete failures. This results in a modified array geometry, distorted far-field radiation pattern, and system performance degradation. Recent remote array diagnostic techniques have emerged as an effective way to detect defective antenna elements in an array with few diagnostic measurements. These techniques, however, require full and perfect channel state information (CSI), which can be challenging to acquire in the presence of antenna faults. This paper proposes a new remote array diagnosis technique that relaxes the need for full CSI and only requires knowledge of the incident angle-of-arrivals, i.e. partial channel knowledge. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique and show that fault detection can be obtained with comparable number of diagnostic measurements required by diagnostic techniques based on full channel knowledge. In presence of channel estimation errors, the proposed technique is shown to out-perform recently proposed array diagnostic techniques.