Analysis and Augmented Spatial Processing for Uplink OFDMA MU-MIMO Receiver With Transceiver I/Q Imbalance and External Interference

This paper addresses receiver (RX) signal processing in multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems. We focus on uplink orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA)-based MU-MIMO communications under in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) imbalance in the associated radio frequency electronics. It is shown in the existing literature that transceiver I/Q imbalances cause cross-talk of mirror-subcarriers in OFDM systems. As opposed to typically reported single-user studies, we extend the studies to OFDMA-based MU-MIMO communications, with simultaneous user multiplexing in both frequency and spatial domains, and incorporate also external interference from multiple sources at RX input, for modeling challenging conditions in increasingly popular heterogeneous networks. In the signal processing developments, we exploit the augmented subcarrier processing, which processes each subcarrier jointly with its counterpart at the image subcarrier, and jointly across all RX antennas. Furthermore, we derive an optimal augmented linear RX in terms of minimizing the mean-squared error. The novel approach integrates the I/Q imbalance mitigation, external interference suppression, and data stream separation of multiple UEs into a single processing stage, thus avoiding separate transceiver calibration. Extensive analysis and numerical results show the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and symbol-error rate (SER) behavior of an arbitrary data stream after RX spatial processing as a function of different system and impairment parameters. Based on the results, the performance of the conventional per-subcarrier processing is heavily limited under transceiver I/Q imbalances, and is particularly sensitive to external interferers, whereas the proposed augmented subcarrier processing provides a high-performance signal processing solution being able to detect the signals of different users as well as suppress the external interference efficiently. Finally, we also extend the studies to massive MIMO framework, with very large antenna systems. It is shown that, despite the huge number of RX antennas, the conventional linear processing methods still suffer heavily from I/Q imbalances while the augmented approach does not have such limitations.