Software defined radios are increasingly used in modern communication systems, especially in cognitive radio. Since this technology has been commercially available, more and more practical deployments are emerging and its challenges and realistic limitations are being revealed. One of the main problems is the RF performance of the front-end over a wide bandwidth. This paper presents an analysis and mitigation of RF impairments in wideband front-ends for software defined radios, focussing on non-linear distortions in the receiver. We discuss the effects of non-linear distortions upon spectrum sensing in cognitive radio and analyse the performance of a typical wideband software-defined receiver. Digital signal processing techniques are used to alleviate non-linear distortions in the baseband signal. A feed-forward mitigation algorithm with an adaptive filter is implemented and applied to real measurement data. The results obtained show that distortions can be suppressed significantly and thus increasing the reliability of spectrum sensing.
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