We develop sub-Nyquist sampling systems for analog signals comprised of several, possibly overlapping, finite duration pulses with unknown shapes and time positions. Efficient sampling schemes when either the pulse shape or the locations of the pulses are known have been previously developed. To the best of our knowledge, stable and low-rate sampling strategies for continuous signals that are superpositions of unknown pulses without knowledge of the pulse locations have not been derived. The goal in this paper is to fill this gap. We propose a multichannel scheme based on Gabor frames that exploits the sparsity of signals in time and enables sampling multipulse signals at sub-Nyquist rates. Moreover, if the signal is additionally essentially multiband, then the sampling scheme can be adapted to lower the sampling rate without knowing the band locations. We show that, with proper preprocessing, the necessary Gabor coefficients, can be recovered from the samples using standard methods of compressed sensing. In addition, we provide error estimates on the reconstruction and analyze the proposed architecture in the presence of noise.
Despite the similarity, there are some important differences between the systems. First, in the mixing stage we use time-limited and non-periodic waveforms, while the MWC relies on periodic functions. Second, following the mixing stage, we use an integrator in contrast to the low-pass filter in @cite_17 . These differences are due to the fact that we are interested in different quantities: content of the signal on time intervals in our work as opposed to frequency bands in @cite_17 . However, in both systems the mixing is used for the same purpose: to reduce the sampling rate relative to the Nyquist rate.
@cite_17
2123629701
Conventional sub-Nyquist sampling methods for analog signals exploit prior information about the spectral support. In this paper, we consider the challenging problem of blind sub-Nyquist sampling of multiband signals, whose unknown frequency support occupies only a small portion of a wide spectrum. Our primary design goals are efficient hardware implementation and low computational load on the supporting digital processing. We propose a system, named the modulated wideband converter, which first multiplies the analog signal by a bank of periodic waveforms. The product is then low-pass filtered and sampled uniformly at a low rate, which is orders of magnitude smaller than Nyquist. Perfect recovery from the proposed samples is achieved under certain necessary and sufficient conditions. We also develop a digital architecture, which allows either reconstruction of the analog input, or processing of any band of interest at a low rate, that is, without interpolating to the high Nyquist rate. Numerical simulations demonstrate many engineering aspects: robustness to noise and mismodeling, potential hardware simplifications, real-time performance for signals with time-varying support and stability to quantization effects. We compare our system with two previous approaches: periodic nonuniform sampling, which is bandwidth limited by existing hardware devices, and the random demodulator, which is restricted to discrete multitone signals and has a high computational load. In the broader context of Nyquist sampling, our scheme has the potential to break through the bandwidth barrier of state-of-the-art analog conversion technologies such as interleaved converters.