Iterative estimation and cancellation of clipping noise for OFDM signals

Clipping is an efficient and simple method to reduce the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals. However, clipping causes distortion and out-of-band radiation. In this letter, a novel iterative receiver is proposed to estimate and cancel the distortion caused by clipping noise. The proposed method is applied to clipped and filtered OFDM signals. It is shown by simulation that for an IEEE 802.11a typical scenario the system performance can be restored to within 1 dB of the nonclipped case with only moderate complexity increase and with no bandwidth expansion.

I. Introduction

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is one of the technologies considered for 4G broadband wireless communications due to its robustness against multipath fading and relatively simple implementation compared to single carrier systems. One of the main drawbacks of OFDM is its high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR).