Tone Reservation for OFDM Systems by Maximizing Signal-to-Distortion Ratio

The performance of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems is highly impacted by clipping distortions caused by non-linear amplifiers. One approach known as Tone Reservation (TR) method is to allocate/use a small number of sub-carriers to generate more suited signals and reduce the impact of these non-linear distortions. Traditionally, existing TR algorithms attempt to minimize the Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR). In this paper, we show that maximization of the Signal-to-Distortion Ratio (SDR) is a better criterion which achieves a better symbol error rate performance. Our results reveal that the proposed approach outperforms in terms of error probability rate for the same transmit power and same order of computational cost. Interestingly, the PAPR value for the proposed algorithm is not better than the state of the art algorithm in which directly optimizes the PAPR.