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Peak-to-Average Power Ratio Reduction of OFDM Signals With Nonlinear Companding Scheme
Jun Hou, Jianhua Ge, Dewei Zhai, and Jing Li

AbstractCompanding transform is a simple and efcient method in reducing the Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems. In this paper, a novel nonlinear companding scheme is proposed to reduce the PAPR and improve Bit Error Rate (BER) for OFDM systems. This proposed scheme mainly focuses on compressing the large signals, while maintaining the average power constant by properly choosing transform parameters. Moreover, analysis shows that the proposed scheme without de-companding at the receiver can also offer a good BER performance. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms other companding scheme in terms of spectrum side-lobes, PAPR reduction and BER performance. Index TermsHigh power amplier (HPA), nonlinear companding, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR).

I. INTRODUCTION

UE to the advantages of high spectral efciency, robustness to frequency selective fading channel and easy implementation with Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) [1], [2], Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has gained popularity in a number of applications including Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB), Terrestrial Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB-T), the IEEE 802.11a standard for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) and the IEEE 802.16d standard for Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks (WMAN). However, some drawbacks are still unresolved in the OFDM systems. One of the major problems is high Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) of transmitted OFDM signals. This high PAPR forces the transmit power amplier to have a large back-off in order to ensure linear amplication of the signal, which signicantly reduces the efciency of the amplier. To solve this high PAPR, many solutions have been presented in the literature, which can be divided in two categoriesOne category is to reduce the probability of generating high PAPR signals before doing multicarrier modulation, such as coding [3], Selective Mapping (SLM) [4], [5], and Partial Transmit

Manuscript received July 27, 2009; revised December 14, 2009; accepted March 08, 2010. First published April 22, 2010; current version published May 26, 2010. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China-Guangdong under Grant U0635003 and by the Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University under Grant IRT0852. J. Hou, J. Ge, and J. Li are with the State Key Laboratory of Integrated Services Networks, Xidian University, Xian 710071, China (e-mail: j.hou.xidian@gmail.com; jhge@xidian.edu.cn; jli@xidian.edu.cn). D. Zhai is with Huawei Technologies Company Ltd., Xian 518129, China (e-mail: zeal0502@yahoo.com.cn). Color versions of one or more gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TBC.2010.2046970

Sequence (PTS) [6], [7]. And yet, most of these solutions have restrictions on system parameters such as the number of subcarriers, frame format, and constellation type. The other category is to deal with the signals after multicarrier modulation, such as clipping [8] and the companding transform [9][16], among which, the simplest and most widely used for reducing the PAPR of OFDM signals is clipping. Nevertheless, it causes additional clipping noise. In addition, this clipping noise becomes very signicant with high modulation orders and seriously degrades the system performance [17], which makes companding more suitable for high data rates applications. In [9], Wang rst proposed the -law companding scheme based on speech processing, and it shows better performance than the clipping. But by -law companding the OFDM signal, the PAPR is reduced at the expense of an increase in the average power. Later, a non-linear companding technique namely exponential companding (EC) [12] has been developed to overcome the problem of increasing average power and to have efcient PAPR reduction. This scheme transforms the Rayleigh distributed OFDM signal into a uniformly distributed signal and achieves better system performance than the -law companding scheme. However, the distribution of large amplitude signals is increased by the uniform companding. Hence, we can predict that Bit Error Rate (BER) performance is degraded when the OFDM transmitters employ a power amplier with heavy nonlinearity. In this paper, a novel non-linear companding scheme is proposed. This scheme mainly focuses on compressing the large signals, while maintaining the average power constant by properly choosing the transform parameters. Furthermore, theoretical analysis shows that the proposed scheme without de-companding operation at the receiver can also offer a good BER performance. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed scheme offers a better PAPR reduction and BER performance than the EC scheme. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section II describes a typical OFDM system model and formulates the problem of high PAPR. Section III introduces the proposed scheme and analyzes why the proposed scheme without de-companding operation offers a good BER performance. In Section IV, the performance of the proposed scheme is compared with the EC scheme through simulation. Finally, conclusions are given in Section V. II. OFDM SYSTEM AND PROBLEM FORMULATION Fig. 1 shows a generic OFDM system using the companding technique, the whole system bandwidth is divided into many orthogonal sub-channels (with narrow bandwidth), and data symbols typically modulated by Phase Shift Keying (PSK)

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The Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) of expressed as

can be

(5)
Fig. 1. Block diagram of an OFDM system with the companding transform.

The proposed companding scheme is given by (6)

or Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) are transmitted independently on the subcarriers. denote the number of sub-carriers used for parallel Let denote the information transmission and th complex modulated symbol in a block of information symbols. The outputs of the -point Inverse Fast Fourier Transform are given by (IFFT) of (1) Then, the power of OFDM signal can be expressed as (2) and the PAPR of OFDM signal in terms of power is dened as (3) where returns the magnitude of and denotes the expectation operation. The peak power occurs when the modulated symbols are added with the same phase. III. PROPOSED SCHEME AND THEORETICAL ANALYSIS

where is the original OFDM signal and is the companded only changes the signal, the proposed companding function amplitudes of input signals. Assume the transition point and the are and , respectively. In the cutoff point of the PDF of , the PDF of is similar to that of ; in the interval , has a uniform distribution. interval has a Rayleigh distribution, the coordinates Since of the transition and cutoff point are and , respectively. Thereby, the PDF of can be expressed as (7) and the CDF of is

(8) , we have From the denition of the PDF . Consider a constant average power level in the non-linear can be companding operation, the power of OFDM signal expressed as (9)

A. Proposed Scheme In this section, we propose a novel non-linear companding technique that can effectively improve the BER performance and reduce the PAPR of transmitted OFDM signals. Moreover, the new scheme has the advantage of maintaining a constant average power through the companding operation. Therefore, the efciency of the amplier can be improved. Assume the input information symbols are statistically independent and identically distributed. Based on the central limit can be approximated as a complex Gaussian process theory, ). Aswhen the number of sub-carriers is large (e.g. has zero mean and variance , so its magnitude sume that has a Rayleigh distribution with the Probability Distribution Function (PDF) given by (4) The power of companded signal can be calculated as

(10)

. By combining (9) and (10), we obtain is a strictly monotonic increasing function, Given that we have

(11)

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is where is attenuation factor. Though the OFDM signal not stationary, it has been shown in [18], [19] that an OFDM signal guarantees to be time invariant. In [19], has been given as (17)

Consider a constant average power level in the companding operation, we have

(18)
Fig. 2. Proles of different companding schemes.

and the closer to 1, the This formula illustrates that smaller will be. With the de-companding operation at the is given by receiver, the recovered signal (19) , . where For simplicity, we consider the OFDM system with the proposed scheme through AWGN channel. Adding guard interval is ignored since it has no bearing on the analysis in this paper. can be expressed In an AWGN channel, the received signal as (20) is the channel noise. where With the de-companding operation, the recovered signal at the receiver is . (21) This formula shows that the de-companding operation amplies to . Without the de-companding opthe channel noise eration, the equivalent noise is composed of two parts: the comand the channel noise . Then, the equivapanding noise lent noise in the proposed scheme with and without the de-comand , respecpanding operation can be written as tively. denote the attenuation factor of the proposed scheme. Let ( is close to 1). From (18), It was calculated that we nd that the proposed scheme results in little companding noise. Therefore, it can be concluded that the proposed scheme without the de-companding operation can also offer a good BER performance. IV. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION To compare the PAPR reduction and BER performance of the proposed scheme with the EC scheme, the AWGN and fading channels are assumed in the simulations. Furthermore, most radio systems often employ High Power Amplier (HPA) in the transmitter to obtain sufcient transmit power [20]. For this

Considering the phase of input signal, the companding funcis given by tion (12) where denotes the sign function. Thus, the companding function can be calculated as

. (13) The de-companding function at the receiver is

(14) According to (3), the PAPR of the proposed scheme can be shown as follows.

(15) Fig. 2 depicts the proles of EC and proposed companding schemes. It can be obtained from this gure that the proposed scheme can offer better PAPR reduction than the EC scheme. B. Theoretical Analysis According to [18], the extension of the Bussgang theorem to complex or real Gaussian inputs can be written as the sum of a useful attenuated input replica and an uncorrelated nonlinear distortion noise. Thus, the companded signal can be modeled as the aggregate of an attenuated signal component and companding noise , as expressed by (16)

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Fig. 3. Power spectrums of EC and proposed companded signals.

Fig. 5. BER performance of different companding schemes with HPA over AWGN channel.

TABLE I BER PERFORMANCE AND PAPR REDUCTION COMPARISON WITH DIFFERENT COMPANDING SCHEMES

x: denotes without de-companding operation at the receiver. Fig. 4. The CCDFs of original OFDM signal and companded signals.

reason, one WLAN HPA with model number AP 1093 produced by RF Integrated Corp. is employed here so that sufcient transmit power can be achieved. We also considered the OFDM , the factor of system utilizing the number of subcarriers and the randomly generated input data are oversampling modulated by Quaternary PSK (QPSK). No coder used in the system, so the performance of the scheme can be clearly found. Fig. 3 shows the spectrum side-lobes caused by the com), panding schemes. Compared with the EC (with degree the proposed scheme results in little spectral regrowth, which can increase the immunity of OFDM signals from out-of-band noise. Figs. 4 and 5 plot the PAPR and BER performance of the OFDM systems. Note that, the performance bound is obtained by ignoring the effect of HPA and directly transmitting the original OFDM signals through the channel. It offers the best BER performance, while it has an extremely high PAPR compared with that of companded signals. The x in the gure denotes without de-companding operation at the receiver. In the two gures, the proposed scheme achieves more PAPR reduction and better BER performance than the EC scheme. To make comparisons, some results of the PAPR reduction and BER performance with different companding schemes are given in Table I.

Specially, in Table I, to achieve a BER of , the minimum is 8.58 dB (Performance bound). The rerequired quired s under the proposed, proposed without de-companding, EC and EC without de-companding schemes are 9.43 dB, 9.01 dB, 11.42 dB and 9.08 dB, respectively. In addition, the PAPR of the proposed scheme is 4.25 dB while the EC scheme is 4.80 dB. It is also observed that compared with the performance bound, the BER performance of the proposed scheme only results in 0.5 dB performance degradation. Fig. 6 depicts the BER performance of different companding schemes with HPA over fading channel, with comparison to that of the original OFDM scheme. As shown in Fig. 6, it can be observed that the BER performance of the proposed scheme is also robust enough in the fading channel. Fig. 7 shows the BER performance of companding schemes with different operations at the receiver. The x in the gure denotes without de-companding operation at the receiver. It was regimes, QPSK can achieve good shown that under low BER performance, and the impact of the amplied channel noise caused by de-companding operation is worse than that of the non-linear distortion caused by the companding. Therefore, QPSK without de-companding operation achieves better BER is performance. For the case of 16-QAM, only when larger than 12.5 dB, the impact of the non-linear distortion is worse than that of the amplied channel noise. Thus, the proposed scheme with de-companding operation offers better

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments which helped to improve the presentation of the paper. REFERENCES
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Fig. 6. BER performance of different companding schemes with HPA over fading channel.

Fig. 7. BER performance of companding schemes with different operations at the receiver.

BER performance. Similar situation also occurred in the condition of EC scheme. These simulation results demonstrate that the proposed companding scheme without de-companding operation can offer a good BER performance.

V. CONCLUSION In this paper, we have proposed and evaluated a novel non-linear companding scheme that can effectively improve the OFDM system performance with low out-of-band distortion. Additionally, theoretical analysis shows that the proposed companding scheme without de-companding operation also offers a good BER performance. Simulation results have shown that the proposed companding scheme could offer better system performance in terms of PAPR reduction, power spectrum and BER performance than the EC scheme.