Demodulation of aggregated RF signals with a unique Rx chain

In the next generation of the mobile radio systems, the information will be distributed on discontinuous frequency bands. To demodulate the RF signal, a possible architecture is to use a number of receivers Rx equal to that of the discontinuous RF frequency bands. This paper demonstrates that this operation can be made with a single receiver Rx. The method is based on the mixing of the RF signal with a local oscillator (LO) signal constituted by several Continuous Wave (CW) signals. The technique is studied theoretically and then applied to the case of RF signal constituted of two frequency bands. The CW frequencies of the LO signal are selected to convert both bands of the RF signal in Zero Intermediate Frequency (ZIF) and LOW Intermediate Frequency (LIF).