In this paper, we present a novel low-complexity scheme, which improves the performance of single-antenna multi-carrier communication systems, suffering from in-phase and quadrature (I/Q)-imbalance (IQI) at the receiver. We refer to the proposed scheme as I/Q-imbalance self-interference coordination (IQSC). IQSC does not only mitigate the detrimental effects of IQI, but, through appropriate signal processing, also coordinates the self-interference terms produced by IQI in order to achieve second-order frequency diversity. However, these benefits come at the expense of a reduction in transmission rate. More specifically, IQSC is a simple transmit diversity scheme that improves the signal quality at the receiver by elementary signal processing operations across symmetric (mirror) pairs of subcarriers. Thereby, the proposed transmission protocol has a similar complexity as Alamouti's space-time block coding scheme and does not require extra transmit power nor any feedback. To evaluate the performance of IQSC, we derive closed-form expressions for the resulting outage probability and symbol error rate. Interestingly, IQSC outperforms not only existing IQI compensation schemes but also the ideal system without IQI for the same spectral efficiency and practical target error rates, while it achieves almost the same performance as ideal (i.e., IQI-free) equal-rate repetition coding. Our findings reveal that IQSC is a promising low-complexity technique for significantly increasing the reliability of low-cost devices that suffer from high levels of IQI.

Published in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications