Cognitive radio by photonic analog-to-digital conversion sensing

This paper proposes a photonic analog-to-digital converter (Ph-ADC) that can be used for localization, fingerprinting and spectral management applications, indicated for cognitive radio applications. The presented approach comprises a time-stretch Ph-ADC with an optimum configuration of optical and electrical amplification stages. This technique increases the bandwidth and sensibility of electronic ADC and can be used for detecting signals with extremely low power. The usage of the proposed Ph-ADC jointly with cognitive radio algorithms allows to minimize interference and to optimize user´s capacity in a given picocell cluster area.