Simultaneous Calibration of Two Spaceborne Phased Arrays for Satellite Communications

Abstract

This paper aims to calibrate the phase deviations of two spaceborne phased arrays (SPAs) simultaneously for in-orbit satellite communication systems. Given multiple transmissions of the pilots, the phase deviations and the channel parameters are jointly estimated with a block coordinate descent algorithm. Moreover, the Cramér Rao bound (CRB) is derived, and the beam patterns are optimized to improve the performance of the over-the-air (OTA) calibration. The simulation results show that the root mean squared errors (RMSEs) of the phase estimates closely approach the corresponding CRB and the beam pattern optimization scheme is also validated for 20dB gain of SNR over the randomly generated beam patterns.