Near Field-based Analysis of Large Scale Antenna Arrays With Reduced Number of Field Samples

Large scale antenna arrays are useful for energy focusing in wireless power transfer. Due to the large size of the arrays, it is challenging to perform direct analysis of large scale antenna arrays. The radiated near field contains rich information of a large scale antenna array. Hence, near field has been utilized to perform analysis of large scale antenna arrays. Because near field scanning is time consuming, it is interesting to perform near field-based analysis with reduced number of field samples. This paper reviews two latest developments of large scale antenna arrays analysis with reduced number of near field samples. First, the sparse source solution is introduced to cut down the near field sample number required for elemental excitation reconstruction. Second, in order to reduce the number of field samples for plane wave spectrum calculation, the spectral integral is calculated by the matrix pencil method. By cutting down the near field sample number, the efficiency of near field-based analysis can he improved.