A Hybrid Approach to Reduce the PAPR of OFDM Signals Using Clipping and Companding

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is an important technology that has been widely used in broadband wireless communications. However OFDM has some drawbacks, one of which is the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) problem. Many techniques for reducing PAPR thus have been proposed in the literatures, where clipping and companding are effective techniques and have gained a lot of research interest. Based on the study of clipping and companding, this paper proposes a hybrid approach to reduce the PAPR of OFDM signals. An iterative clipping and filtering (ICF) technique and an enhanced nonlinear companding (ENC) scheme are used as the typical clipping and companding techniques in this paper. The results of the analysis show that the computational complexity of the proposed method is slightly higher than that of ENC, but much lower than that of ICF. And the simulation results show that the proposed method has better performance on PAPR reduction and bit error rate (BER) in contrast to ICF. On the other hand, compared to ENC with equal PAPR reduction, the proposed method still achieves better performance on BER.