Independent Component Analysis Based Semi-Blind I/Q Imbalance Compensation for MIMO OFDM Systems

We propose a novel semi-blind compensation scheme for both frequency-dependent and frequency-independent I/Q imbalance based on independent component analysis (ICA) in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, where ICA is applied to compensate for I/Q imbalance and equalize the received signal jointly, without any spectral overhead. A reference signal is embedded in the transmitted signal with little power consumption and no spectral overhead introduced, to enable ambiguity elimination for the ICA output signal at the receiver. Moreover, channel interpolation is incorporated with layered space frequency equalization (LSFE) to enhance the system performance. Simulation results show that the proposed implicit compensation scheme can not only provide a better bit error rate (BER) performance and a higher bandwidth efficiency than the previous training based I/Q imbalance compensation method, but also outperform the ideal case with perfect channel state information (CSI) and no I/Q imbalance, due to additional frequency diversity.