Multifrequency radio frequency sensing with photonics-assisted spectrum compression

Abstract

We propose and demonstrate a multifrequency radio frequency (RF) spectrum estimation technology. With photonic assistance, a multifrequency RF signal ranging from 0 to 1 GHz is highly spectrally compressed and sensed using a single analog-to-digital converter with analog bandwidth of 42.6 MHz. By calculating the cross correlation of pseudo random binary sequence and the encoded signal, up to 40 RF tones are precisely recognized without large computational load. The employment of optical mixing decreased the cost and increased the performance compared to its electrical counterpart. The theory and performance are also discussed.