A low-complexity sub-Nyquist sampling system for wideband Radar ESM receivers

The problem of efficient sampling of wideband Radar signals for Electronic Support Measures (ESM) is investigated in this paper. Wideband radio frequency sampling generally needs a sampling rate at least twice the maximum frequency of the signal, i.e. Nyquist rate, which is generally very high. However, when the signal is highly structured, like wideband Radar signals, we can use the fact that signals do not occupy the whole spectrum and instead, there exists a parsimonious structure in the time-frequency domain. Here, we use this fact and introduce a novel low complexity sampling system, which has a recovery guarantee, assuming that received RF signals follow a particular structure. The proposed technique is inspired by the compressive sampling of sparse signals and it uses a multi-coset sampling setting, however it does not involve a computationally expensive reconstruction step. We call this here Low-Complexity Multi-Coset (LoCoMC) sampling technique. Simulation results, show that the proposed sub-Nyquist sampling technique works well in simulated ES scenarios.