Improving dynamic range of software-defined radio receivers for multi-carrier wireless systems

This study presents an architecture to increase the instantaneous dynamic range of multi-carrier wideband digital receivers. The proposed topology includes a directional coupler followed by two parallel analog-to-digital converters and digital signal processing to reconstruct the signal. It will be shown that the proposed technique is able to increase the dynamic range of software-defined radio (SDR) receivers for multiband signals presenting certain statistical patterns. The concept is validated by simulations and measurements of a real SDR front-end receiver for multiband communications scenario, which will demonstrate improvements in the order of 6 dB when compared to existing alternatives.