Digitally-enhanced wideband analog-digital interfaces for future cognitive radio devices

The cognitive radio concept has gained widespread interest to avoid spectral scarcity in next generation mobile communications systems. However, there are major challenges from the radio transceiver electronics point of view. This paper addresses the analog-to-digital converter saturation problem due to highly-varying signal conditions in wideband cognitive radio receivers. Two different post-processing approaches are proposed here to mitigate this nonlinear distortion. Their performance is compared to current state-of-the-art methods using laboratory radio signal measurements with commercially available hardware.