Channel Estimation and Equalization for Terahertz Receiver with RF Impairments

The radio frequency (RF) impairments of analog devices have been regarded as an important factor degrading the performance of Terahertz (THz) communications, where in-phase/ quadrature (IQ) imbalance and phase noise (PN) are the two typical RF impairments at THz transceiver. In this paper, we investigate the channel estimation (CE) and equalization for THz receiver in the presence of wideband IQ imbalance and PN, where single-carrier frequency-domain equalization is used. Since PN is inserted between channel impulse response (CIR) and wideband IQ imbalance at the receiver, the CIR and IQ imbalance cannot be treated together as an effective channel. Therefore, a novel two-stage CE method is derived to separately estimate the CIR and wideband IQ imbalance parameters, and its corresponding channel equalization method is designed to compensate both wideband IQ imbalance and PN, and equalizes the CIR. Theoretical and simulation results validate the efficiency of our proposed CE, and the proposed equalization method is shown to outperform the state-of-the-art methods.