Impact of I/Q Imbalance on Receive Space Modulation Techniques

Receive space modulation relies on channel knowledge at the transmitter and precoding to spatially modulate the receive antennas. This results in reduced complexity and more efficient receiver implementations. Receive space modulation techniques (RSMTs) in particular are a recently introduced family of hardware implementations that leverage receive space modulation. As with any RF hardware implementation, RSMTs will suffer from the effects of RF impairments due to non-ideal behavior of components. Particularly, the I/Q modulator is an essential component in most transmitter implementations which suffers from phase and amplitude imbalance that have an adverse effect on transmitted signals. In this paper, the impact of I/Q amplitude and phase imbalance on the performance of RSMTs is analyzed an studied. It is revealed through the acquired results that amplitude imbalance has the most adverse effect on the different systems, in particular when a high modulation order of an arbitrary constellation is leveraged.