Diagnosis of Planar Arrays Through Phaseless Measurements and Sparsity Promotion

A new compressive-sensing-inspired approach is proposed to the detection of faulty radiators in planar antenna arrays from a reduced set of phaseless far-field measurements. In order to deal with whatever kind of arrays, the problem is cast as the recovery of the aperture-field distribution, and two new convex-programming solution procedures are introduced. The first one relies on the improvement of the Total Variation norm technique, while the second one exploits a new aperture field expansion, which allows drastically reducing the number of unknowns of the problem. A wide set of numerical experiments involving benchmark scenarios, as well as full-wave data relative to a realistic antenna, is provided in support of the given theory.