Compressive sensing in a photonic link for acquisition of spectrally-sparse wideband signals: Potentials and limitations

Compressive sensing (CS) is a novel technology to realize sub-Nyquist sampling for measuring of sparse signals. Due to the advantages of high bandwidth offered by photonics, realization of compressive sensing in a photonic link is of great interest. In this paper, we discussed the limitations of CS in a conventional photonic link A potential solution is proposed. To further reduce sampling rate, we propose to combine the techniques of photonic time stretch and CS. In addition, the photonic CS with random mixing realized by a spatial light modulator is discussed. Theoretical limit on frequency resolution for spectral mixing is derived.