Peak-to-average power ratio analysis of multi-carrier pulse shape synthesis

MC (multi-carrier) pulse shape synthesis and decomposition offers significant BER performance gains when compared with traditional OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) and SC (single-carrier) systems. How-even there is no prior work that characterizes and quantifies the PAPR performance of MC pulse shape synthesis. This paper addresses that issue. We compare the PAPR of MC pulse shape synthesis with traditional OFDM and SC systems using the raised cosine pulse shape. Our results show that the PAPR of the MC system is lower than the OFDM system (using QPSK and 48 carriers, MC average PAPR is 1.9 dB lower than OFDM). We also show that the PAPR performance of the MC system is roughly equivalent to (for roll-off factors≥0.2 using QPSK and≥0.4 using 64-QAM), if not better than (for roll-off factors≤0.2 using QPSK and≤0.4 using 64-QAM), the SC system.