  Compressive sensing (CS) exploits the sparsity present in many signals to
reduce the number of measurements needed for digital acquisition. With this
reduction would come, in theory, commensurate reductions in the size, weight,
power consumption, and/or monetary cost of both signal sensors and any
associated communication links. This paper examines the use of CS in the design
of a wideband radio receiver in a noisy environment. We formulate the problem
statement for such a receiver and establish a reasonable set of requirements
that a receiver should meet to be practically useful. We then evaluate the
performance of a CS-based receiver in two ways: via a theoretical analysis of
its expected performance, with a particular emphasis on noise and dynamic
range, and via simulations that compare the CS receiver against the performance
expected from a conventional implementation. On the one hand, we show that
CS-based systems that aim to reduce the number of acquired measurements are
somewhat sensitive to signal noise, exhibiting a 3dB SNR loss per octave of
subsampling, which parallels the classic noise-folding phenomenon. On the other
hand, we demonstrate that since they sample at a lower rate, CS-based systems
can potentially attain a significantly larger dynamic range. Hence, we conclude
that while a CS-based system has inherent limitations that do impose some
restrictions on its potential applications, it also has attributes that make it
highly desirable in a number of important practical settings.
