In-the-Field Calibration of All-Digital MIMO Arrays

Maryam Eslami Rasekh, Bhagyashree Puranik, Upamanyu Madhow, Mark J. W. Rodwell

Abstract: A key goal of next generation networks is to scale hardware design and signal processing algorithms to mmWave and THz arrays with a large number of elements. Imperfect manufacturing and limitations of circuit design introduce variations in the gain and relative phase offset of transmit and receive array elements that must be compensated prior to beam formation for either communication or sensing. We propose a novel method for calibrating large arrays in the field by exploiting the sparsity of the spatial channel. While conventional calibration methods are susceptible to multipath components in the wireless channel, our approach is shown to be robust to multipath interference if the measurements are gathered from a sufficiently diverse set of locations.