Decision-Directed Channel Estimation and High I/Q Imbalance Compensation in OFDM Receivers

Direct-conversion architectures suffer from the mismatch between the in-phase (I) and the quadrature-phase (Q) branches, commonly called I/Q imbalance. Even low I/Q imbalances imply poor performance of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that uses both training and data symbols in a decision-directed fashion to jointly estimate the channel and compensate for high receiver I/Q imbalance. Simulation results show that our method can compensate for high I/Q imbalance values and also estimate a frequency selective channel.