Relaxing RF component requirements in a Weaver architecture by learning and adapting to the environment

This paper presents an architecture that utilizes spectrum sensing with a Weaver architecture receiver to ease the requirements on the RF front-end components. With the ability to sense the environment, large interferers that overwhelm small desired signals can be avoided. The learning and adapting capabilities are enabled by means of a flexible receiver architecture with variable local oscillators (LOs) and tunable bandpass filters. Avoiding large interferers can reduce image rejection (IR) requirements for a given performance level and results in greater tolerance for low-Q filters and receiver mismatches. The design approach is applied to an IEEE 802.11a receiver and has shown significant performance improvements compared to conventional approaches despite an 18 dB lower image rejection