Qualitative comparison of the different photonic based frequency measurement methods

The paper presents a comparison results of three different photonic-assisted instantaneous frequency measurement methods. The working principles of the photonic time stretch enhanced recording scheme, the parallel low-speed optical sampling technique and channelization method with image-rejection down-conversion are presented. Each of the presented schemes was modelled through multiple simulations in the VPIphotonics Design Suite 9.8 software environment. The overall results showed that frequency measurement accuracy for the photonic time stretch technique was around 100 MHz, as for the parallel low-speed optical sampling approach was 0.5 MHz and for the channelization method was 0.4 MHz. The advantages and disadvantages of each scheme were also pointed out.