Joint estimation of I/Q imbalance, CFO and channel response for MIMO OFDM systems

In this paper, we study the joint estimation of inphase and quadrature-phase (I/Q) imbalance, carrier frequency offset (CFO), and channel response for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems using training sequences. A new concept called channel residual energy (CRE) is introduced. We show that by minimizing the CRE, we can jointly estimate the I/Q imbalance and CFO without knowing the channel response. The proposed method needs only one OFDM block for training and the training symbols can be arbitrary. Moreover when the training block consists of two repeated sequences, a low complexity two-step approach is proposed to solve the joint estimation problem. Simulation results show that the mean-squared error (MSE) of the proposed method is close to the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB).