Analysis and mitigation of RF IQ imbalance in eigenvalue based multichannel spectrum sensing

Direct-conversion radio receivers can provide highly-integrated and low-cost hardware solutions for cognitive radio (CR) devices. However, such receiver structures are also known to suffer from various RF circuit imperfections, especially IQ imbalance. When studying the performance of various spectrum sensing methods, most existing work in literature neglect the effects of such RF imperfections. In this paper, we analyze the performance of a well-known eigenvalue based sensing method, namely maximum-to-minimum eigenvalue test, in the challenging multichannel spectrum sensing context under sensing receiver RF IQ imbalance. It is analytically shown that under RF IQ imbalance, the false alarm probability of the spectrum sensor is always higher compared to ideal RF front-end case. Then, in order to compensate for such degradation in the ability to identify free spectrum, a waveform level interference cancellation solution is deployed to enhance the performance, and optimum cancellation coefficient together with a practical sample estimator are formulated. Extensive computer simulations are provided to illustrate the degradation of false alarm probability in the presence of practical IQ imbalance values. Furthermore, the simulations also show that the proposed interference cancellation method can efficiently suppress the IQ imbalance effects, achieving identical false alarm probability with the ideal RF front-end case.