Derivation and Analysis of the BER Closed Form in the OFDM Communication System with IQ Imbalance

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing(OFDM) is very useful for the wireless communication system. However, OFDM is very sensitive to the radio frequency impairments. One of the most important major impairments is the IQ imbalance between in-phase(l) and quadrature(Q) branches in the up and down-conversion. IQ imbalance can be divided into phase and amplitude imbalances. These imbalances make constellation of signal to expand and rotate. The performance of system is severely degraded. In this paper, a closed-form for the bit error probability of the OFDM signal in IQ imbalance environment is derived in terms of the function of phase and amplitude imbalance parameters. So, it will be convenient and useful to evaluate the performance of OFDM communication system with IQ imbalance. It is confirmed that computer simulation results closely match with the results of the analytical derivation. When phase imbalance $\varphi=20^{\circ}$, amplitude imbalance $\varepsilon=0.1$; 0.3; 0.4; 0.5, BER at $10^{-5}$ is severely degraded by 1.8 dB, 3.12 dB, 4.72, and 8.44 dB, respectively.