New technique combining the tone reservation method with clipping technique to reduce the peak-to-average power ratio

Abstract

Nonlinear distortions and impairments appear in multicarrier signal with high fluctuations when amplified by a Radio Frequency Power Amplifier (RF PA). This article is a contribution to improving the Tone Reservation (TR) method dedicated to reducing fluctuations in the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) modulation. This method exploits the null sub-carriers in communications standards in order to generate a correction signal used to reduce the Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) with nevertheless limited performances due to the reduced number of these sub-carriers. For this purpose, our contribution is to combine the TR method with the Clipping (CL) method to improve the PAPR reduction without significantly impacting the quality of transmissions. We also show the gain provided by this strategy compared to the use of classical methods. Experiments using a simulated example on a complete WiMax 802.16e transmitter have been made in order to investigate the PAPR reduction performances on presence of the non-linear Power Amplifier model based on gain compression response and phase distortion.