Preamble Based Joint CFO, Frequency-Selective I/Q-Imbalance and Channel Estimation and Compensation in MIMO OFDM Systems

A very promising technical approach for future wireless communication systems is to combine MIMO OFDM and Direct (up/down) Conversion Architecture (DCA). However, while OFDM is sensitive to Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO), DCA is sensitive to I/Q-imbalance. Such RF impairments can seriously degrade the system performance. For the compensation of these impairments, a preamble-based scheme is proposed in this paper for the joint estimation of CFO, transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) frequency-selective I/Q-imbalance and the MIMO channel. This preamble is constructed both in time- and frequency domain and requires much less overhead than the existing designs. Moreover, Closed-Form Estimators (CLFE) are allowed, enabling efficient implementation. The advantages and effectiveness of the proposed scheme have been verified by numerical simulations.