Blind estimation of IQ imbalance withnull subcarriers for OFDM systems

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is sensitive to the in-phase and quadrature-phase (IQ) imbalance induced by the direct conversion architectures. A compensation scheme of IQ imbalance exploiting null subcarriers in OFDM symbols is presented. The proposed algorithm is with high bandwidth utilization because the training symbols are not required. The effect of IQ imbalance on OFDM systems is studied, and the mirror relationship between the FFT of a sequence and that of its conjugate is employed to estimate and compensate the IQ imbalance. This method can be applied to multiple input multiple output (MIMO) OFDM systems with space time block code (STBC). Performance analysis shows that the proposed algorithm is asymptotically unbiased. The variance is inversely proportional to the number of OFDM symbols, null subcarriers, the SNR and the channel frequency response, and proportional to the IQ imbalance. Simulation results demonstrate that this scheme can obtain almost the optimal bit error rate (BER).