Receiver design for multi-carrier transmission systems in the presence of imperfections

Recent personal mobile communication standards have pushed for sophisticated modulation techniques which offer higher data throughput with minimal complexity in channel estimation and equalization. To achieve this objective mobile terminals require high quality performance
from RF front-end devices.
Heterodyne receivers have been a widely preferred choice for RF frontends. Although these receivers have no performance issues however they are not monolithically integratable and therefore cannot be miniaturized.
Direct conversion receivers have been around for almost a century but they have not been widely used because of their sensitivity to image problems. Further loss in the quality of RF front-ends can lead to problems like phase noise, carrier frequency offset and direct current offset. The large dynamic range of modulated signals can also be
subject to the non-linear behaviour of high power amplifiers.
In the presence of all these constraints, it has been of significant research interest to explore robust techniques to jointly estimate channel and RF front-end non-idealities. The objective of this thesis is to explore low complexity schemes which take care of the imperfections
present in the RF front-ends at the expanse of minimal computational complexity. The proposed schemes operate coherently to estimate the channel impulse response and other imperfections thus allowing us to reduce the constraints on analog components.
Finally, the proposed schemes are designed arround the wireless local area network standards and therefore blend seamlessly into the overall system.