Compendious Concurrent Dual-Band Receiver Based on Multiport Interferometric Architecture

A distinct usage of the conventional multiport architecture is introduced in this work to explore the compendious scheme of a concurrent dual-band interferometric receiver. Dual RF signals at individual frequency channels are received simultaneously, and only a single low-power local oscillator (LO) source is deployed for frequency translation or conversion to the same intermediate frequency (IF) band. Although these signals are spectrally overlapped, they can be extracted with a simple and efficient algorithm with good channel-to-channel isolations. Compared to the conventional multiport configuration, the power detectors are replaced by analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) to process the signals in this proposed scheme. The underlying physics of the concurrent receiving operation is explained and derived analytically. Some experiments are also presented to investigate various performance indexes, including signal linearity, noise behavior, interchannel interference, and so forth. Lastly, multiple M-quadratic-amplitude modulation (QAM) signals are applied to evaluate the communication behavior of the proposed receiver architecture. Distortions due to frequency drift, channel imbalance, and in-phase and quadrature (IQ) imbalance are studied, and bit-error-rates (BER) are measured and compared with their theoretical counterparts. All obtained results confirm that the proposed interferometric receiver provides good communication performances.