Existence of codes with constant PMEPR and related design

Recently, several coding methods have been proposed to reduce the high peak-to-mean envelope ratio (PMEPR) of multicarrier signals. It has also been shown that with probability one, the PMEPR of any random codeword chosen from a symmetric quadrature amplitude modulation/phase shift keying (QAM/PSK) constellation is logn for large n, where n is the number of subcarriers. Therefore, the question is how much reduction beyond logn can one asymptotically achieve with coding, and what is the price in terms of the rate loss? In this paper, by optimally choosing the sign of each subcarrier, we prove the existence of q-ary codes of constant PMEPR for sufficiently large n and with a rate loss of at most log_q2. We also obtain a Varsharmov-Gilbert-type upper bound on the rate of a code, given its minimum Hamming distance with constant PMEPR, for large n. Since ours is an existence result, we also study the problem of designing signs for PMEPR reduction. Motivated by a derandomization algorithm suggested by Spencer, we propose a deterministic and efficient algorithm to design signs such that the PMEPR of the resulting codeword is less than clogn for any n, where c is a constant independent of n. For symmetric q-ary constellations, this algorithm constructs a code with rate 1-log_q2 and with PMEPR of clogn with simple encoding and decoding. Simulation results for our algorithm are presented.