Decoupled compensation of IQ imbalance in MIMO OFDM systems

The direct-conversion architecture is an attractive front-end design for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. These systems are typically small in size and provide a good flexibility to support growing number of wireless standards. However, direct-conversion based OFDM systems are generally very sensitive to front-end component imperfections. These imperfections are unavoidable especially when cheaper components are used in the manufacturing process and can lead to radio frequency (RF) impairments such as in-phase/quadrature-phase (IQ) imbalance. These RF impairments can result in a severe performance degradation. In this paper, we propose training based efficient compensation schemes for MIMO OFDM systems impaired with transmitter and receiver frequency selective IQ imbalance. The proposed schemes can decouple the compensation of the transmitter and receiver IQ imbalance from the compensation of the channel distortion. It is shown that the proposed schemes result in an overall lower training overhead and a lower computational requirement as compared to a joint estimation/compensation of IQ imbalance and the channel distortion.