Digital post-processing based wideband receiver linearization for enhanced spectrum sensing and access

Wideband radio receivers provide the flexibility desired in many communications applications and are the key element in cognitive radios and software-defined radios in general. However, multi-channel reception scenarios tend to have high dynamic range which set hard-to-reach requirements for receiver linearity. This paper proposes a calibration-based digital post-inverse model for wideband receiver linearization and compares it with adaptive interference cancellation. Their advantages and disadvantages are highlighted together with numerical performance results in challenging non-contiguous spectrum access scenario. Both methods are waveform-independent, which make them applicable to many systems, but they have different tradeoffs when linearization accuracy, computational complexity and real-time capability are compared. Therefore selecting the best method is highly system-specific matter.