Optical Sampler for Broad-Spectrum Sensing

Abstract

We investigated the feasibility of using non-uniform optical sampling to measure wide bandwidth RF signals more efficiently. This combined two areas of signal measurement research: optical sampling, which uses optics to alleviate the bandwidth limitations of traditional electronic sampling, and compressed sensing, which seeks to measure signals with fewer samples than typically necessary. This can both increase accuracy and reduce cost over current state-of-the-art sampling devices. However, several different compressed sensing architectures and algorithms offer varying levels of performance, robustness and complexity. In this work, we compared the tradeoffs between several of these methods in simulation of a remote sensing application. We found that while feasible, compressed sensing is inherently less sensitive than fully sampled systems, and so must be paired with a very low noise optical system. We also built an experimental prototype of the system and took initial measurements.