Complex Properness Inspired Blind Adaptive Frequency-Dependent I/Q Imbalance Compensation for Wideband Direct-Conversion Receivers

Direct-conversion receivers (DCRs) have been adopted in wideband communication systems owing to their simple structure and low cost, however, their operation is affected by amplitude and phase mismatches between their analog inphase (I) and quadrature (Q) branches, as well as the discrepancy of low-pass filter coefficients between these two channels. In this paper, a blind adaptive frequency-dependent I/Q imbalance compensator is proposed, which exploits the complex properness (second-order circularity) of ideal constellation mappings to provide more enhanced insight into the problem setting within the proposed compensator. This serves as a basis for a novel full second-order performance assessment framework, which is established through a joint consideration of the weight error covariance and complementary covariance in both the transient and steady-state stages. This conjoint analysis is further shown to facilitate accurate quantification of the overall mirror-frequency interference attenuation capability of the proposed compensator. Simulation results in an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission system demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed compensator.