Fast Array Diagnosis for Subarray Structured 5G Base Station Antennas

Antenna array composed of subarrays is a widely used array structure in the fifth-generation (5G) base stations (BSs), which can offer both high gain beam and beam-steering capability. Generally, subarray-structured BS antennas consist of a number of subarrays, each composed of a few antenna elements, making the array diagnosis a pronounced and challenging problem. A fast diagnosis method, which can be conducted in the near-field of the BS array, is presented for BS array of subarrays in this letter. The objective is to detect antenna failures, which can be caused by the disconnection at either the feed of subarray or the feed of the antenna element in the subarray, based on complex array signals recorded by only a few probes with a short measurement distance. The diagnosis is achieved by a novel two-stage measurement procedure based on solving linear equations. Finally, an array composed of four subarrays with 24 antenna elements in total was used to validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method in a practical setup.