Downlink Performance of Regularized ZF in Massive MIMO Systems Subject to IQ Imbalance

This paper studies the impact of in-phase and quadrature imbalance (IQI) on the downlink of a single-cell multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) system with large antenna arrays. Moreover, we consider a time-division duplex (TDD) system where we assume uplink/downlink channel reciprocity in the downlink precoding design. We study the impact of uplink/downlink channel mismatch on the downlink rate caused by different IQI at the base station (BS) and users equipment (UEs). A tractable analytical expression to predict the achievable downlink rates is derived for the regularized zero-forcing (RZF) and based on this expression, we prove that, as the number of BS antennas grow large, the achievable downlink rate of each UE is limited either by the RX IQI at the UEs or by the simultaneous presence of the transmit/receive IQI at the BS and TX IQI at the UEs, when there is uplink/downlink channel mismatch.