Impropriety-Based Multiantenna Spectrum Sensing With I/Q Imbalanced Radios

Direct conversion radios are widely recognized as the most appealing approach for reducing the hardware cost as well as power consumption in upcoming communication systems. However, such radios are known to entail gain and phase uncertainties along the analog inphase/quadrature (I/Q) paths. In this paper, we address the effects of the transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) I/Q errors or mismatches on the improperness of the transmitted and received signals, respectively. We analytically show how the properness of a transmitted signal and the receiver thermal noise can be destroyed, respectively, under the transmitter and receiver I/Q errors, given that the corresponding ideal signals are proper under perfect I/Q balance. Then, we address the spectrum sensing problem in cognitive radio systems through modeling it as a composite binary hypothesis testing task, and apply the likelihood ratio test approach to solve it. To this end, we propose three impropriety-based multiantenna spectrum sensing algorithms under the transmitter and receiver I/Q uncertainties. The principle of invariance is exploited to examine the potential constant false alarm rate (CFAR) behavior of the proposed detectors. We analytically prove that all the proposed sensing methods possess CFAR behavior against the noise variance uncertainty, while only two of them have CFAR property against the receiver I/Q mismatch values. The achievable sensing performance of the proposed methods is then analyzed through extensive numerical experiments, and the devised alternative detectors are mutually compared. Finally, analytical solutions are derived to quantify the improvement/degradation in the effective received signal SNR under I/Q imbalanced radios.