Peak-to-Average Power Ratio Analysis for NC-OFDM Transmissions

In this paper, we present a statistical analysis of the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) for non-contiguous orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (NC-OFDM) signals. When studying contiguous OFDM signals, most PAPR analysis techniques assume the symbols to be identically and independently distributed (i.i.d.). However, in an NC-OFDM transmission, where a large number of subcarriers could be deactivated, this assumption is no longer valid. The proposed PAPR analysis is derived specifically for the NC-OFDM transmission scenario. Results show that NC-OFDM signal exhibit higher PAPR values relative to contiguous OFDM transmission at the same information rate.