Dynamic range and compressive sensing acquisition receivers

Compressive sensing (CS) exploits the sparsity present in many signal environments to reduce the number of measure- ments needed for digital acquisition and processing. We have previously introduced the concept and feasibility of using CS techniques to build a wideband signal acquisition systems. This paper extends that work to examine such a receiver’s performance as a function of several key design parameters. In particular we show that that the system noise figure is predictably degraded as the subsampling implicit in CS is made more aggressive. Conversely we show that the dynamic range of a CS-based system can be substantially improved as the subsampling factor grows. The ability to control these aspects of performance provides an engineer new degrees of freedom in the design of wideband acquisition systems. A specific practical example, a multi-collector emitter geoloca- tion system, is included to illustrate that point.