High-Resolution Frequency Estimation Using Generalized Coprime Sampling

The coprime sampling scheme allows signal frequency estimation through two sub-Nyquist samplers where the down-sampling rates M and N are coprime integers. By considering the difference set of this pair of O(M +N) physical samples, O(MN) consecutive virtual samples can be generated. In this paper, a generalized coprime sampling technique is proposed by using O(M +pN) samples to generate O(pMN) virtual samples, where p is an integer argument. As such, the existing coprime sampling techniques are represented as a special case of a much broader and generalized scheme. The analytical expressions of the number of virtual samples, frequency resolution and the corresponding latency time are derived. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is verified using simulation results.