PAPR reduction of FBMC-OQAM using A-law and Mu-law companding

Filter bank multicarrier scheme is an efficient multicarrier scheme and candidate waveform for 5G. Similar to OFDM and other multicarrier schemes, FBMC also has high Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) which leads us to the use of high power amplifiers with high dynamic range. Companding techniques are used to reduce PAPR at the expense of bit error rate (BER) performance degradation. In this paper, a novel usage of A-law and Mu-law companding techniques for PAPR reduction of FBMC-OQAM scheme are proposed. The paper also investigates the tradeoff between PAPR reduction and Bit error rate performance of FBMC-OQAM using A-law and Mu-law companding techniques. Simulation results have shown a significant decrease in PAPR but BER of the system has increased. Both the companding techniques have shown similar results but Mu-law companding has given a slightly better performance than A-law companding in PAPR reduction but BER of A-law companding is better than Mu-law companding.

I. Introduction

With the increased demand for higher data rates, the future wireless communication systems need to be designed according to these specifications. Multicarrier schemes are the best choice to increase the bit rate as the whole frequency selective channel is distributed into multiple sub-bands each with less frequency selective fading [1]. Simple equalization can be achieved at the receiver by increasing the number of subbands and then each subband can be considered to have flat-fading only.