A New Approach For Peak-to-Average Power Reduction in OFDM System

Madhumita Paul1, Manjira Saha2, Punam Goswami3, Baibhav Sukla4, Apurba Das5
Department of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Silchar. Email: mita_paul@rediffmail.com1, manjira_saha@rediffmail.com2, punam_666@yahoo.co.in3

Abstract One of the major drawbacks of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is high Peak-toAverage Power Ratio (PAPR) which can result in poor power efficiency and serious distortion in the transmitter amplifier. In this paper we have proposed a new technique for reducing the PAPR in an OFDM system. We have used a technique based on the Tone Reservation (TR) technique, which reduces PAPR by reserving a number of carriers (tones) in the frequency domain to generate a cancellation signal in the time domain in order to remove high peaks selectively. A Gaussian pulse has been created as the cancellation signal. A simple and effective algorithm has been devised to reduce the peak values. This technique is then compared with the simple Clipping method. Index terms OFDM, Peak-to-average-Power Ratio (PAPR), Tone Reservation (TR), Multi-carrier modulation (MCM)

in-band and out-of-band distortion. Filtering can be used to alleviate out-of-band distortion but results in peak regrowth. Repeated clipping and filtering can lead to serious degradation in bit-error-rate (BER). The tone reservation (TR) algorithm was developed by Tellado , where a small number of sub-carriers (tones) are reserved to create a signal which can cancel the high peaks in the message signal at the transmitter. This can reduce the PAPR of the OFDM signals without introducing any additional distortions to the information and does not require side information. However, TR can have a high computational cost due to the difficulties of finding an effective cancellation signal in the time domain from only a small number of reserved tones in the frequency domain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on TR for overcoming this difficulty by creating a Gaussian-pulse-like cancellation signal. This uses a simple procedure for reducing peak values. II. OVERVIEW OF TONE RESERVATION

I. INTRODUCTION Multi-carrier modulation (MCM) has recently gained relevance among modulation schemes because of its intrinsic robustness in frequency selective fading channels, thus, making it a candidate for systems such as Digital Audio and Video Broadcasting (DAB and DVB-T), Digital Subscriber Lines (x-DSL), and Wireless LAN. Wireless digital communications is rapidly expanding, resulting in a demand for wireless systems that are reliable and have a high spectral efficiency. One of the major drawbacks of any MCM system, which is often an obstacle to its use, is the fact that the signal has a non-constant envelope, i.e. it exhibits peaks whose power strongly exceeds the mean power; the signal is said to have a high Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR). Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has a high tolerance to multipath signals and is spectrally efficient making it a good candidate for wireless communication systems but being MCM, OFDM has PAPR as a major disadvantage. Several techniques have been developed to combat the PAPR problem. The simplest is clipping, but it causes In an OFDM system with N sub-carriers, the transmitted base band signal can be written as: 1 x(t) = N-1 k=0 Xk e (j2kft) , 0 <= t <= T > (1) N where Xk is the symbol carried by the kth sub-carrier, f is the frequency difference between sub-carriers, and T is the OFDM symbol duration. In the transmitter, the transmitted signal is generated by the Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT) of the N-point sequence [ Xk ] and at the receiver, the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is used to restore the signal. The PAPR of the transmitted signal can be expressed as: max x(n)2 PAPR(x) = 10 log 10 > (2) E [ x(n)2 ] With the increase in sub-carriers, higher peak values may occur, i.e. PAPR increases proportionally with the number of sub-carriers.

In Tone Reservation, a small number of sub-channels (tones) which do not carry any information, are reserved for peak cancellation. This restricts the data vector X and the reserved tone vector C to lie in disjoint frequency subspaces, i.e. both cannot be nonzero at a reserved tone. The addition of the reserved tones c to message signal x, produces a new composite signal as denoted below. _ x[n] = x[n] + c[n] = IFFT ( Xk + Ck ) > (3) The new PAPR becomes: _ max x(n) + c(n)2 PAPR(x) = 10 log 10 E [ x(n)2 ] > (4)

generated by selecting a few tones in the frequency domain using Gaussian pulses as they can be optimized in both time and frequency domain. Unlike other methods, the generation of this cancellation signal does not require complicated peak searching or optimization techniques. Only one time IFFT operation is required and very few tones are needed. IV. ALGORITHM FOR REDUCING PAPR The following algorithm is applied to the OFDM system to cancel the high peaks so that the transmitted signal does not exceed the required threshold.

From the above equation, we can see that the PAPR can be reduced by optimizing c(n) such that maxx(n) + c(n)2 can be smaller than maxx(n)2 .

I. A cancellation signal is generated by using Gaussian pulses, which has nonzero values in the reserved tone locations in the frequency domain and one sharp peak in the time domain. II. Peaks that exceed the required threshold are searched for, in the message signal. If peaks are present, the magnitude of the peaks and their corresponding locations are detected.

III.

For each detected peak, the peak of the cancellation signal is circularly shifted to the peak location and scaled by the value of the difference between the peak and the threshold. In this way, the power of the peak is reduced to the desired target level. IV. The process is continued until all the peaks are below the required threshold. Fig. 1 Schematic diagram of Tone Reservation The flowchart is shown in the following page. III. GENERATION OF GAUSSIAN PULSES FOR RESERVED TONES In the tone reservation technique, a small number of sub-carriers (tones) are reserved to create a signal which cancels the high peaks of the message signal. The cancellation signal must be generated in the frequency domain using the minimum number of tones to maximize the data throughput. However, a narrow time domain signal is also preferred to prevent the occurrence of secondary peaks. In this paper, we propose a simple algorithm, in which a Gaussian window-like signal is employed in the frequency domain to form the cancelling pulse in time domain. A narrow pulse in the time domain can be

START

Detect peak sample no. and magnitude

Circularly shift the peak of the cancellation signal to the detected peak location

Scale the cancellation signal peak with the difference between the detected peak magnitude and threshold Subtract the scaled cancellation signal from the original OFDM signal at the peak location

Fig. 3 Real part of the generated OFDM signal

Are all peaks checke d? ?

Any seconda ry peak ?

Y Fig. 2 Representation of the procedure for cancellation of the peaks V. RESULTS Fig. 4 Elimination of peaks after 1st iteration, using Tone Reservation

In order to verify the proposed approach, we simulated it in MATLAB. We have used the algorithm for 64, 256, 512 and 1024 sub-carriers. A bandwidth of 20 MHz and QPSK modulation have been used. It is seen that the high peaks are effectively removed, and an improved CDF plot of PAPR is obtained with our technique.

Fig. 5 Elimination of peaks after further iterations

Fig. 7 Comparison of the original received spectrum (above) with the spectrum obtained using clipping method (below); for 64 subcarriers

Fig. 6 The clipped signal

Fig. 8 Comparison of the original received spectrum (above) with the spectrum obtained using Tone Reservation technique (below); for 64 subcarriers

Fig. 11 Comparison with clipping for 512 subcarriers

Fig. 9 CDF plot of PAPR before reduction of PAPR

Fig. 12 Comparison using TR, for 512 subcarriers The different values of PAPR and BER with both clipping technique and tone reservation technique, for different number of subcarriers are tabulated below. Fig. 10 CDF plot of PAPR after reduction of PAPR
No. of subcarriers PAPR (before) PAPR (after clipping) 2.26 3.15 3.20 4.00 BER (after clipping) 0.1111 0.0694 0.1528 0.0191 PAPR (after TR) 2.53 2.89 3.35 4.80 BER (after TR) 0.0278 0.0417 0.0718 0.0087

64 256 512 1024

3.25 4.00 4.64 6.60

VI.

CONCLUSION

The main drawback of clipping technique is that a threshold value is selected which is applied to the signal at all points i.e. the entire signal is clipped at that threshold value. As a result of this, there is reduction in PAPR but there are two main problems firstly, BER increases and secondly there is significant distortion in the spectrum of the clipped signal compared to the unclipped signal. Here, BER comes in the order of 10-1. The advantage of our technique is that here, we can find a trade-off between BER and PAPR. As already mentioned earlier, the PAPR reduction introduces loss of information. Unlike clipping method, where the selected threshold is applied to the entire signal, here we can select and remove the peaks one by one using a cancellation signal which in our case, is the Gaussian signal. Now the basic underlying concept used is that PAPR is introduced in a signal when there is sudden rise of peaks. So instead of clipping the entire signal if only those selected peaks are reduced then there can be a significant reduction in PAPR with added two benefits firstly, there is not much distortion in the spectrum of the signal compared to the original signal and secondly, the value of BER is reduced. In the tone reservation technique, BER is in the order of 10-2 to 10-3 .

[6] Tellado, J. and Cioffi, J. M., Efficient algorithms for reducing PAR in multicarrier systems," Proc. IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, p. 191, Aug. 1998. [7] High Peak to Average Ratio Solution in OFDM of 4G Mobile Systems by Jihad Qaddour School of Information Technology Illinois State University. [8] Peak-to-Average Power Control in OFDM Systems by Renaldi Winoto. [9] Ramjee Prasad, OFDM for Wireless Communication Systems. Artech House Publishers, 2004. [10] J.G.Proakis ,Digital Edition.McGraw Hill ,1995. Communications, 3rd

[11] Communication Systems, Simon Haykin. [12] Wireless Rappaport. Communication, Second Edition,

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