Abstract
We present techniques for solving the problem of detecting element
failures in phased array antennas by using a combination of a single
fixed probe and an optimization of element excitations using principles
derived from compressive sensing. This departs significantly from
conventional techniques where the excitations are held constant and
probes are instead moved spatially to collect measurements. Doing so
helps us to accomplish two objectives with regards to successful fault
diagnosis. First, we achieve a reduction in the number of measurements
required compared to the state of the art; this reduction is
particularly significant in the case of high-noise measurements where
existing methods fail. Second, our techniques solve the problem of fault
diagnosis in the case of real valued measurements (i.e. intensity
measurement along with phase detection instead of phase measurement),
which leads to simpler measurement hardware. We use nonconvex
optimization algorithms to generate numerical results in support of our
conclusions.