Abstract
Amplify-and-forward (AF) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmissions encounter a significant difficulty in the form of in-phase and quadrature phase (IQ) mismatch. Previous reports on this problem have solely been discussed in the context of uncoded transmissions. In addition, in these precedent studies, IQ equalization must be conducted following the estimation stage for accurate detection of data symbols. This research delves into the issue of the IQ mismatch between transmission and reception in AF-OFDM systems in the context of channel coding. We design a magnificent code-aided approach to predict the overall channel impulse responses (CIRs), which encompass the actual CIRs and IQ mismatch originating at the source, relay, and destination. Instead of using a collection of algorithms, the proposed approach can be utilized to estimate nine parameters simultaneously. Due to the impractical nature of the precise maximum-likelihood (ML) strategy to this situation, we instead utilize an expectation-maximization (EM) process as a low complexity strategy to predict the parameters under consideration. The suggested estimation approach uses an iterative process to improve predictions exploiting the a priori knowledge gained from the soft information supplied by the channel decoder. In addition, we demonstrate how to carry out data detection by making use of the estimated parameters. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed estimator and detector for usage in real-world settings, with superiority over the conventional ones.