Widely linear precoding for large-scale MIMO with IQI: Algorithms and performance analysis

In this paper, we study widely linear precoding techniques to mitigate in-phase/quadrature-phase (IQ) imbalance (IQI) in the downlink of large-scale multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) systems. We adopt a real-valued signal model, which considers the IQI at the transmitter, and then develop widely linear zero-forcing (WL-ZF), widely linear matched filter, widely linear minimum mean-squared error, and widely linear block-diagonalization (WL-BD) type precoding algorithms for both single- and multiple-antenna users. We also present a performance analysis of WL-ZF and WL-BD. It is proved that without IQI, WL-ZF has exactly the same multiplexing gain and power offset as ZF, while when IQI exists, WL-ZF achieves the same multiplexing gain as ZF with ideal IQ branches, but with a minor power loss, which is related to the system scale and the IQ parameters. We also compare the performance of WL-BD with BD. The analysis shows that with ideal IQ branches, WL-BD has the same data rate as BD, while when IQI exists, WL-BD achieves the same multiplexing gain as BD without IQ imbalance. Numerical results verify the analysis and show that the proposed widely linear type precoding methods significantly outperform their conventional counterparts with IQI and approach those with ideal IQ branches