A low-complexity peak-to-average power ratio reduction technique for OFDM-based systems

One major drawback of OFDM is the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of the output signal. To reduce the PAPR, some methods use the reserved tones to produce the clipping signal. However, this kind of method usually needs complicated computations. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective algorithm to iteratively determine the values of the reserved tones. For practical applications, such as the IEEE 802.11a wireless LAN and the digital video broadcasting system, we can choose some of the unused subcarriers or tones defined in the standards as the reserved tones to avoid lowering the transmission rate. Computer simulation results show that the transmitted signal processed by the proposed method has a better PAPR distribution and meets the transmit spectrum mask defined in the standards. The proposed method induces no in-band distortion and out-of-band radiation. As compared to the selected mapping and partial transmit sequences schemes, it does not need any side information and reaches comparable performance with much lower complexity.