【摘 要】 We consider optical processing of wideband RF signals for beamforming with antenna arrays. We focus on the applications with the number of antenna elements L much greater than the number of users K, e.g. multibeam satellites. For wideband signals, be... 更多 >> We consider optical processing of wideband RF signals for beamforming with antenna arrays. We focus on the applications with the number of antenna elements L much greater than the number of users K, e.g. multibeam satellites. For wideband signals, be%amforming requires frequency selective processing that is expensive if electronic filters are used. We investigate the use of optical signal processing to reduce the number of electronic filters from L in the base case with one filter per antenna element. We first show that wideband nulling of K -1 interfering users can be done by performing conventional beamforming in optics followed by K electronic filters. We then focus on digital transmission with K users and show that, instead of K independent symbol detections after interference nulling, joint detection allows us to perform conventional beamforming in optics followed by K electronic matched filters. The key observation is that the number of electronic filters depends on the number ofusers K and not on the number of antenna elements L. << 收起
