Demonstration of RF Digitising Concurrent Dual-Band Receiver for Carrier Aggregation over TV White Spaces

In order to meet the high data rate, low latency and high energy efficiency requirements, the future radio units must utilise the frequency spectrum available at certain geographical location efficiently with a minimum amount of hardware. This requires frequency agility and concurrent multi-standard operation capabilities at the base and mobile terminals. To utilise the TV white spaces for mobile and wireless communication and enable their carrier aggregation with sub GHz LTE bands, this paper presents a single-chain, reconfigurable, RF digitising, dual-band receiver comprised of a tunable dual-band antenna, a reconfigurable digital down converter, a baseband processing unit and wideband LNA and ADC in the form of an oscilloscope. The presented dual-band receiver is tested through a hardware-in-the-loop test-bed which shows that up to 20 MHz aggregate bandwidths can be achieved. The receiver is able to provide equivalent error vector magnitude (EVM) performance across a wide range of frequencies avoiding any inter-band interference.