Estimation of the 5G Massive-MIMO Antenna Beams using Drones by Minimum Trace Norm Minimization

The use of drones to measure the pattern of the antenna in situ and in operative conditions is a very attracting option of 5G m-MIMO (massive-MIMO) antenna characterization. However, during the measurement session the pattern rapidly changes covering all the possible beams. This makes the estimation of the patterns less trivial than the case of 4G single beam antennas. In this paper we propose the use of the minimum trace norm approach to restore the patterns from the set of measured data. A simple example regarding 4 beams antenna (3 Traffic Beams and one Broadcast Beam) is discussed.