An Array-based Compressed Sensing Receiver Architecture

This paper describes an Array-based Compressed sensing Receiver Architecutre (ACRA) which allows a digital receiver array to drastically increase its instantaneous bandwidth to detect, estimate, and determine angle of arrival of signals which are sparse in frequency or angle-frequency space. ACRA intentionally aliases the wideband signal at each element of the array, but uses different sampling rates at different antennas. The unique aliasing patterns produced at each channel can be used to determine the true frequencies of received signals using the sparse fast Fourier transform or similar algorithms. The concept is demonstrated using an 8-channel testbed targeting the 18-50 GHz band. The analog to digital converters in the testbed have a maximum sampling rate of 2 GSPS; thus the testbed demonstrates the potential for a sixteenfold increase in bandwidth when in-phase and quadrature sampling is used.