A Time-Domain Joint Estimation Algorithm for CFO and I/Q Imbalance in Wideband Direct-Conversion Receivers

Abstract

Carrier frequency offset (CFO) and in-phase and quadrature-phase (I/Q) imbalance are two of the common front-end impairments in low-cost communication devices. It is known that CFO can cause significant performance degradation in multi-carrier modulation (MCM) systems. Also, the existence of the I/Q imbalance usually reduces the accuracy of CFO estimation. In this paper, we propose a new data-aided scheme for the joint estimation of CFO and I/Q imbalance using simple matrix formulation. The proposed algorithms utilize only the periodicity of the generalized periodic pilot (GPP). They do not need to know the channel impulse response and the exact values of the training sequence. Moreover, our method has a low complexity and its performance compares favorably with the existing methods.