Analysis and Compensation of Tx and Rx IQ Imbalances in AFDM System

TL;DR

This paper investigates the impact of joint transmitter and receiver IQ imbalance on AFDM systems, deriving analytical BER expressions and proposing a cascade compensation scheme to mitigate these impairments.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of IQ imbalance effects on AFDM and introduces an effective compensation method to improve system performance.

Findings

IQI causes significant BER performance degradation in AFDM.

The proposed cascade compensation scheme effectively mitigates IQI effects.

Analytical expressions accurately predict BER performance under IQI conditions.

Abstract

Affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) is a recently proposed multicarrier waveform whose bit error rate (BER) performance in doubly selective channels is comparable to that of orthogonal time-frequency space (OTFS) and superior to that of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). In this paper, the impacts of joint transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) in-phase and quadrature imbalance (IQI) on AFDM signals are investigated, where we show that AFDM suffers more severe IQI than OFDM and OTFS due to the inherent feature of complicated chirp-assisted modulation. We further derive analytical expressions for the pairwise and average bit error probability as a function of the IQI parameters. These indicate that such distortions significantly limit the achievable operating signal-to-noise ratio at the receiver side and data rates. To this end, we propose a cascade compensation scheme to mitigate these effects. Specifically, we first compensate for Rx IQI to convert the improper Gaussian noise into additive white Gaussian noise, and then apply a judicious design to eliminate the Tx IQI. Both analytical and simulation results reveal that joint Tx and Rx IQI introduce an error floor in the BER performance of AFDM systems, whereas the proposed approach effectively compensates such impairments.