Compressive sensing in a photonic link with optical integration.

In this Letter, we present a novel structure to realize photonics-assisted compressive sensing (CS) with optical integration. In the system, a spectrally sparse signal modulates a multiwavelength continuous-wave light and then is mixed with a random sequence in optical domain. The optical signal passes through a length of dispersive fiber, the dispersion amount of which is set to ensure that the group delay between the adjacent wavelength channels is equal to the bit duration of the applied random sequence. As a result, the detected signal is a delay-and-sum version of the randomly mixed signal, which is equivalent to the function of integration required in CS. A proof-of-concept experiment with four wavelengths, corresponding to a compression factor of 4, is demonstrated. More simulation results are also given to show the potential of the technique.