Blind Receiver Distortion Compensation

Abstract

A novel technique to compensate for the nonlinearity of a receiver (RX) is proposed and demonstrated experimentally. The adaptive technique is fully blind and does not require any prior knowledge of the transmitting signal. The technique has the capability to both characterize and compensate for the nonlinearity of the RX, making it suitable for implementations in both communication and instrumentation systems. For the former, two RXs operating simultaneously and an attenuator are required to enable real-time data transmission. For the latter, measurements using a single RX and an attenuator can be done instead. By utilizing the knowledge of the signals received at different input power levels, the proposed technique provides improvements to the RX linearity. The technique is demonstrated experimentally with an RF amplifier, where significant improvements quantified through multiple indicators, e.g., the adjacent channel power ratio, are observed.