Hybrid time/frequency domain compensator for RF impairments in OFDM systems

I/Q signal processing based communication systems suffer from analog front-end (FE) imperfections such as in-phase and quadrature-phase (I/Q) imbalance and carrier frequency offset (CFO). These impairments are commonly encountered in all practical implementations, and severely degrade the obtainable link performance. Moreover, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based systems are particularly sensitive to radio frequency (RF) impairments. In this paper, we analyze the impact of transmitter and receiver I/Q imbalance together with channel distortion and CFO error on an ideal transmit signal, and propose low-complexity DSP algorithms and compensation structure for coping with such imperfections. Based on our proposed estimation/compensation structure, we are able to decouple the impairments and process them individually with rather low-complexity. More specifically, we first apply a blind algorithm for receiver I/Q imbalance compensation, followed by an efficient time domain CFO estimator and compensator. The transmitter I/Q imbalance and channel are then equalized jointly, in the frequency domain, with maximum-likelihood (ML) or zero-forcing (ZF) schemes, respectively. The applied algorithms are either blind working without aid of any training symbol or use only one OFDM symbol for impairments estimation, providing an efficient alternative solution with reduced complexity. The computer simulation results indicate a close to ideal performance of ZF scheme, and suggest that additional performance improvement due to frequency diversity can be obtained when ML estimation technique is employed.