Enhanced Effective Aperture Distribution Function for Characterizing Large-Scale Antenna Arrays

Accurate characterization of large-scale antenna arrays is growing in importance and complexity for the fifth-generation (5G) and beyond systems, as they feature more antenna elements and require increased overall performance. The full 3-D patterns of all antenna elements in the array need to be characterized because they are in general different due to construction inaccuracy, coupling, antenna array’s asymmetry, etc. The effective aperture distribution function (EADF) can provide an analytic description of an antenna array based on a full-sphere measurement of the array in an anechoic chamber. However, as the array aperture increases, denser spatial samples are needed for EADF due to large distance offsets of array elements from the reference point in the anechoic chamber, leading to a prohibitive measurement time and increased complexity of EADF. In this article, we present the EADF applied to large-scale arrays and highlight issues caused by the large array aperture. To overcome the issues, an enhanced EADF is proposed with a low complexity that is intrinsically determined by the characteristic of each array element rather than the array aperture. The enhanced EADF is validated using experimental measurements conducted at 27–30 GHz frequency band with a relatively large planar array.