Wideband Spectrum Sensing Receiver for Cognitive Radio Application

For effective spectrum utilization, cognitive radio makes use of wideband spectrum sensing receiver. Current wideband receiver architectures need wideband analog to digital converter (ADC) to sample wideband signal. As current state-of-art ADC has limitation in terms of power and sampling rate, there is a need to explore other alternative solutions. Compressive sampling (CS) data acquisition method is one of the alternatives. Cognitive radio signal which is sparse in frequency domain is sampled at sub-Nyquist rate using lower sampling rate ADC. To reduce the receiver complexity we use modulated wideband converter (MWC) architecture, a sub-Nyquist sampling method. The circuit level design of this architecture covers signal within frequency range of 500 MHz to 2.1 GHz, with channel bandwidth of 1600 MHz. By using 8 parallel paths with channel trading factor of 11, effective sampling rate of 550 MHz is achieved for successful support recovery of multi-band input signal of size N=12.