Compressed sensing-based direct conversion receiver

Due to the continuously increasing computational power of modern data receivers it is possible to move more and more processing from the analog to the digital domain. This paper presents a compressed sensing approach to relaxing the analog filtering requirements prior to the ADCs in a direct conversion receiver. In the presented solution, the filtered down-converted radio signals are randomly sampled with an average sampling frequency lower than its Nyquist rate, and then reconstructed in a DSP system. To enable compressed sensing, this approach exploits the frequency domain sparsity of the down-converted radio signals. As shown in an experiment presented in the article, when the proposed method is used, it is possible to relax the requirements for the quadrature down-converter filters. A random sampling device and an additional digital signal processing module is the price to pay for these relaxed filter requirements.