Impacts of CFO, IQ imbalance and phase noise on the system performance in OFDM systems

OFDM systems are sensitive to front-end imperfections including CFO, IQ imbalance and phase noise. In practice, these imperfections are inevitable and would lead to significant performance degradation. In this paper, a general closed-form expression on average signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) over multipath fading channels is derived for performance evaluation. When additive white Gaussian noise channels and flat fading channels are considered, the expression reduces to an exact expression and a tight upper bound, respectively. Our results show that the average SINR is inversely proportional to these front-end non-idealities.