A wide band reconfigurable radio using compressive sensing

The tremendous advancement in communications technology and its use in a wide range of applications have increased the importance of high bandwidth reconfigurable receivers that can monitor a large bandwidth and be reconfigured to receive signals within a specific sub-band. Because of the stringent power and size requirements in most applications for communications systems, it is important to achieve such high surveillance bandwidth and reconfigurability with the minimum possible power consumption and hardware components. In this paper we propose a high bandwidth radio receiver based on the newly emerging theory of compressive sensing. The proposed receiver can reconstruct signals in a specific sub-band within a wide surveillance band using an analog-to-digital converter running at a rate comparable to the sub-band bandwidth, and much less than the surveillance bandwidth. The desired band to be reconstructed can be changed in software thus eliminating the use of many bandpass filters.