Design of a Single Channel Modulated Wideband Converter for Wideband Spectrum Sensing: Theory, Architecture and Hardware Implementation

In a cognitive radio sensor network (CRSN), wideband spectrum sensing devices which aims to effectively exploit temporarily vacant spectrum intervals as soon as possible are of great importance. However, the challenge of increasingly high signal frequency and wide bandwidth requires an extremely high sampling rate which may exceed today's best analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) front-end bandwidth. Recently, the newly proposed architecture called modulated wideband converter (MWC), is an attractive analog compressed sensing technique that can highly reduce the sampling rate. However, the MWC has high hardware complexity owing to its parallel channel structure especially when the number of signals increases. In this paper, we propose a single channel modulated wideband converter (SCMWC) scheme for spectrum sensing of band-limited wide-sense stationary (WSS) signals. With one antenna or sensor, this scheme can save not only sampling rate but also hardware complexity. We then present a new, SCMWC based, single node CR prototype System, on which the spectrum sensing algorithm was tested. Experiments on our hardware prototype show that the proposed architecture leads to successful spectrum sensing. And the total sampling rate as well as hardware size is only one channel's consumption of MWC.