IQ-Imbalance Compensation for OFDM in the Presence of IBI and Carrier-Frequency Offset

In this paper, we propose a frequency-domain equalization technique for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission over frequency-selective channels. We consider the case where the receiver analog front-end suffers from IQ-imbalance and the local oscillator suffers from carrier-frequency offset (CFO). While the IQ-imbalance results in a mirroring effect, the CFO induces inter-carrier interference (ICI). In addition to ICI, we consider the channel delay spread is larger than the cyclic prefix (CP). This means that inter-block interference (IBI) is present. The frequency-domain equalizer is obtained by transferring a time-domain equalizer (TEQ) to the frequency-domain resulting in a per-tone equalizer (PTEQ). Due to the presence of IQ-imbalance the conventional TEQ (where only one TEQ is applied to the received sequence) is not sufficient to cope with the mirroring effect. A sufficient TEQ consists of two time-domain filters; one applied to the received sequence and another applied to a conjugated version of the received sequence. For the case of IQ-imbalance and CFO, the TEQs are designed according the basis expansion model (BEM) which showed to be able to cope with the ICI problem. Finally, in addition to the frequency-domain PTEQ design procedure, a training-based RLS type initialization scheme for direct per-tone equalization is also proposed