An overview of peak-to-average power ratio reduction techniques for multicarrier transmission

High peak-to-average power ratio of the transmit signal is a major drawback of multicarrier transmission such as OFDM or DMT. This article describes some of the important PAPR reduction techniques for multicarrier transmission including amplitude clipping and filtering, coding, partial transmit sequence, selected mapping, interleaving, tone reservation, tone injection, and active constellation extension. Also, we make some remarks on the criteria for PAPR reduction technique selection and briefly address the problem of PAPR reduction in OFDMA and MIMO-OFDM.

Introduction

Multicarrier transmission, also known as orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) or discrete multitone (DMT), is a technique with a long history [1]–[6] that has recently seen rising popularity in wireless and wireline applications [7]–[9]. The recent interest in this technique is mainly due to the recent advances in digital signal processing technology. International standards making use of OFDM for high-speed wireless communications are already established or being established by IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.16, IEEE 802.20, and European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Broadcast Radio Access Network (BRAN) committees. For wireless applications, an OFDM-based system can be of interest because it provides greater immunity to multipath fading and impulse noise, and eliminates the need for equalizers, while efficient hardware implementation can be realized using fast Fourier transform (FFT) techniques.