This paper proposes a novel scheme called as“frequency domain imbalance estimation” that estimates the imbalance of the Hilbert transformer in heterodyne multimode/band receivers with baseband automatic gain control (AGC). The proposed scheme uses correlation matrices in the frequency domain. This enables the receivers to keep high transmission performance in spite of the imbalance of the analog Hilbert transformer, by offsetting the imbalance. Moreover, the baseband AGC relaxes the requirement of the baseband A/D converter. The performance of imbalance estimation and imbalance cancellation is verified by computer simulation. As a result, it is shown that the proposed scheme not only estimates the imbalance of Hilbert transformer with extremely high precision, but also cancels the image-band interference such that it achieves the theoretical performance.

Microcellular systems are suitable as personal mobile communication systems because of their high channel re-use efficiency and low transmission power. To implement a microcellular system, the antennas of base stations should be low enough, compared to the buildings around them, to reduce the interference to or from other base stations. In high-speed digital mobile radio communications, the time delay spread caused by multipath propagation is a significant factor in determining the maximum data transmission rate. In the case of a low-antenna-height microcellular system, the propagation characteristics rapidly change when the mobile terminal moves from a line-of-sight (LOS) location to a non-line-of-sight (NLOS) location. In this paper, the time dealy spread characteristics under LOS and NLOS conditions are examined using a geometrical street model which has a reflecting wall at one end of the street on which the base station is located. The RMS delay spreads are calculated using optical ray theory, taking into consideration the wedge diffraction on the street corner. If a reflecting wall exists, the RMS delay spread increases as the mobile terminal moves away from the base station under LOS conditions, or away from the street corner under NLOS conditions. The calculated results agree with the experimental results if measuring equipment noise is taken into consideration.

This paper proposes a blind image-band interference canceller that enables heterodyne receivers with only a single receiver chain to demodulate signals in any frequency band. In this paper, such a receiver is called "multimode/multiband heterodyne receiver." If multimode/multiband receivers are desired to receive signals with carrier frequency ranging from several MHz to GHz, then, such receivers are not allowed to have a narrow band RF-BPF (Radio Frequency Band Pass Filter) at the RF front end. However, although heterodyne receivers have been applied to wireless systems due to their high performance, it is known that without an RF-BPF heterodyne receivers suffer from severe image-band interference. Therefore, a blind image-band interference canceller is proposed in this paper to mitigate the image-band interference. Moreover, a novel algorithm based on the CM (Constant Modulus) criterion is proposed to carry out the cancellation. Performance of the blind image-band interference canceller is theoretically analyzed and the performance of the proposed canceller is verified by computer simulation. As a result, it is shown that the blind image-band interference canceller achieves superior performance even in the presence of strong image-band interference, for example, CIR=-40 dB. In summary, the proposed canceller makes it possible for the receiver with the single receiver chain to achieve multimode/multiband communications with high quality.

It is known that a heterodyne multimode receiver implemented with a single RF (Radio Frequency) receiver suffers from image-band interference due to imbalance, i.e. the phase error and the gain imbalance of the RF Hilbert transformer. The blind image band interference canceler with deterministic imbalance estimation that has been proposed mitigates the image-band interference. This performance of the image-band interference canceler is analyzed theoretically in this paper. As a result, it is revealed that estimation accuracy of the deterministic imbalance estimation is improved slightly as the imbalance becomes greater. In addition, it is also shown that the deterministic estimation achieves better performance as the power of image-band interference increases. The performance is confirmed by computer simulation.