5G New Radio Compliant IQI Compensation

The 5G New Radio (NR) standard allows for the utilization of mmWave band to achieve multi-Gbps throughput and low latency. However, radio transceivers are much more sensitive to hardware imperfections such as phase noise and IQ imbalance (IQI) at higher frequencies. Particularly, IQI can severely deteriorate the thorughput of radio links by increasing symbol error rates. This letter proposes a receiver IQI compensation procedure using exclusively the 5G NR reference signals. It is shown that the new method has the capability of outperforming existing procedures while requiring no previous information about the IQI parameters or the channel.