I/Q imbalance mitigation for time-reversal STBC systems over frequency-selective fading channels

This work studies the effect of in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) imbalance on time-reversal space-time block coded (TR-STBC) communication systems operating over frequency-selective fading channels. The transceiver I/Q imbalance in a 2 times 1 TR orthogonal STBC (TR-OSTBC) system is studied in detail, and low-complexity mitigation solutions are proposed by exploiting the special structure of the received data. Our results show that the proposed solutions both in time domain and in frequency domain can effectively mitigate the I/Q distortion in such a system.