Abstract:
Modern communication networks suffer from various imperfections that significantly degrade their performance. Transmitters (Tx) and receivers (Rx) employ local oscillators to up-and-down-convert the in-phase (I) and quadrature-phase (Q) signals to the carrier frequency and baseband. re¬spectively. However, due to the non-idealities of the local oscillators and mixers, there is an imbalance in the gain and phase of the up/down¬converted I/Q signals. This problem is quite prevalent in direct-conversion radio architecture where the image falls within the band of interest after down-conversion. A low-cost implementation of such physical layers is challenging be¬cause of impairments associated with the analog components therefore ef¬ficient digital hardware is needed to mitigate these effects. The effects of I/Q imbalance can be mitigated using signal process-ing techniques, instead of adding hardware components to the transceiver topology or making changes in the transceiver topology.
