Sub-Nyquist sampling-based wideband spectrum sensing: a compressed power spectrum estimation approach

In this paper, we introduce a sub-Nyquist sampling-based receiver architecture and method for wideband spectrum sensing. Instead of recovering the original wideband analog signal, the proposed method aims to directly reconstruct the power spectrum of the wideband analog signal from sub-Nyquist samples. Note that power spectrum alone is sufficient for wideband spectrum sensing. Since only the covariance matrix of the wideband signal is needed, the proposed method, unlike compressed sensing-based methods, does not need to impose any sparsity requirement on the frequency domain. The proposed method is based on a multi-coset sampling architecture. By exploiting the inherent sampling structure, a fast compressed power spectrum estimation method whose primary computational task consists of fast Fourier transform (FFT) is proposed. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.