Equalization Techniques for SC-FDMA Systems Under Radio Imbalances at Both Transmitter and Receiver

Abstract Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) is a multi-carrier, multiple access (MA) technique, which is widely adopted in contemporary wireless standards. Single carrier-frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) is a modified version of OFDMA which employs single carrier transmission by pre-coding the data symbols using discrete Fourier transform (DFT). However, these systems are highly vulnerable to adverse effects arising in the channel, carrier frequency offset (CFO) and in-phase/quadrature phase (I/Q) imbalances. In the uplink communication scenario, the signal received at base station is the superposition of signals from all active multiple users. Even though the adverse effects caused by the communication channel and CFOs are addressed in the related literature extensively, the effect of I/Q-imbalances at the transmitter and the receiver is rarely considered. The effect of I/Q-imbalances will make the equalization process at the base station more complex. It is because the overall effective channel with radio impairments must be included in the system modelling. Hence the receiver processing should contain the equalization for effect of the channel, CFOs and I/Q imbalances. In this paper, we propose a novel technique based on the oblique projection (OP) technique for equalizing the channel, radio imbalances and synchronization errors caused by both transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) for OFDMA/SC-FDMA uplink systems. We also propose an equalization technique with reduced computational complexity to overcome the adverse effects caused by I/Q imbalances and CFOs. The results of the simulation studies illustrate that the proposed techniques can compensate all the above-mentioned effects and they offer very good performance under both TX and RX I/Q imbalances.