Cross-Validation Estimation for Frequency-Dependent I/Q Imbalance in MIMO-OFDM Receivers

The effects of variation in RF, such as I/Q imbalance and filter mismatch, are extremely important for OFDM wireless accesses. This work presents a low-computational estimation of I/Q imbalances with filter mismatches to improve performance in MIMO-OFDM receivers. For N × N MIMO-OFDM systems, the proposed cross-validation estimation is such that, only N + 1 preambles are required to extract the mismatches of filters, gains and phases. With the estimated parameters, frequency-domain filters are exploited to correct frequency-dependent I/Q imbalances. Through performance evaluation of a 2 × 2 MIMO-OFDM system, with ideal channel estimations this study incurs a SNR loss of 1–1.2 dB to maintain a 10% PER at 1-dB gain error, 10°-phase error and the worst 180°-filter mismatch. In addition, this algorithm is well-matched to IEEE 802.11n and new specifications discussed in IEEE 802.11 VHT study group.