Reducing The Peak-to-Average Power Ratio in OFDM

Kevin Huang, SUID: 05118478, Email: kevhuang@stanford.edu December 5th, 2003

Abstract: This project will review several ways to reduce PAP ratio. Methods such as clipping, redundant coding and adding artificial signals will be included. Coding is good for systems with small number of carriers. Clipping sounds detrimental but the performance degradation can actually be compensated because it reduces the dynamical range of A/D which reduces the quantization noise. Artificial signals are good at the cost of some extra power needed to transmit these signals. Most of the papers model the nonlinear noise as an additive Gaussian noise, which is reasonable when the clipping level is low enough so that the event of clipping occurs quite frequently. If, on the other hand, the clipping level is high enough so that clipping is a rare event, then this nonlinear noise should be modeled as an impulsive noise instead.

I. Introduction
OFDM has several properties which make it an attractive modulation scheme for high speed transmission links. Powerful channel equalization is not needed to combat ISI and if differential modulation is applied, no channel estimation is required at all. Thus, the complexity of OFDM systems can be much lower compared with a single carrier transmission system. One major difficulty about OFDM is its large peak-to-average (PAP) ratio which distorts the signal if the transmitter contains nonlinear components such as power amplifiers (PAs). The nonlinear effects on the transmitted OFDM symbols are spectral spreading, intermodulation, and changing the signal constellation. In other words, the nonlinear distortion causes both in-band and out-of-band interference to signals. The in-band interference increases the BER of the received signal through warping of the signal constellation and intermodulation while the out-of-band interference causes adjacent channel interference through spectral spreading. The latter is

what prevents the usage of OFDM in many systems even if the in-band interference is tolerable. Therefore the PAs requires a backoff which is approximately equal to the PAPR for distortionless transmission. This decreases the efficiency for amplifiers. Therefore, reducing the PAPR of practical interest.

II. Background
The OFDM baseband signal for N subcarriers is:

The an and bn are the in-phase and quadrature modulating symbols. If each carrier has amplitude A, the maximum PAPR will be: (NA)^2 / [N*(A2/2 )] = 2N When the number of subcarriers N is small, a PAPR of 2N has reasonable chances of occurring. However, if N is large enough so that the central limit theorem applies, the amplitude distribution of the OFDM signal is better approximated by a Rayleigh distribution since a PAPR of 2N has exceedingly small probability of occurring. In [1], it is shown that the cumulative distribution function for the peak power per OFDM symbol is (from [1]):

This distribution is also plotted in:

Figure 1: cdf-distribution (non-oversampling) for (left to right) 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 1024 solid line is simulated (from [1])

As can be seen from the graph, high PAPR does not occur often. The in-band interference caused by the nonlinearity results in a warping (a rotation and magnitude gain) of the received constellation:
Figure 2: Signal constellation at the output of FFT for 16-QAM, N = 64 (from [2])

The spectral spreading effect is also plotted for N = 128:

Figure 3: CR =clipping ratio and is defined by the ratio of the clipping level to the rms power of the OFDM signal

(from [4])

This graph shows significant spectral splattering due to clipping.

III. Review of PAPR Reduction Methods

A. Redundant Coding The first method we will discuss is redundant coding. The basic premise is that of all possible message symbols, only those with low peak power will be chosen by coding as valid codewords for transmission [3]. By doing so, we do not introduce any distortion to the signals. If we have N subcarriers, they are represented by 2N bits using QPSK modulation and thus 22N messages. Using the whole message space corresponds to zero bits of redundancy. Using only half of the messages corresponds to one bit of redundancy. The remaining message space is then divided in half again and this process continues until N bits of redundancy have been allocated which corresponds to a rate onehalf code for N carriers. When the number of carriers is high, increasing the redundancy beyond a rate one-half code yield a diminishing return and the absolute limit on peak power improvement is when 2N 4 bits are allocated to redundancy and only 16 messages, which have the lowest PAPR, are left to be transmitted [3]. The PAPR for up to 15 carriers for different bits of redundancy have been tabulated and the table is included below (note: in the graph, the maximum PAPR is set to N instead of 2N):

Table 1: (from [3])

From the table, we can see that with just one bit of redundancy, we can reduce the PAPR down to 4 and below for up to 15 carriers. And with just a few more bits of redundancy, we can keep the PAPR below 3. In [3], it is also postulated that as the number of carriers increases, the amount of redundancy needed to achieve a PAPR of below 3 converges toward a rate code. B. Clipping and Filtering Coding is a desirable method to reduce the PAPR for small number of carriers since it does not introduce any distortion to the signal. As the number of carriers increases, however, coding becomes intractable since the memory needed to store the codebook and the CPU time needed to find the corresponding codeword grows exponentially with the number of carriers. The second method for reducing PAPR, whose efficiency does not depend on the number of carriers, is clipping. As shown in figure 3, clipping causes significant spectral leak into adjacent channels. These out-ofband components must be filtered to prevent adjacent channel interference. However, the act of filtering causes peak regrowth. In [4], a 128 carrier OFDM signal is clipped and filtered by a 103-tap equi-ripple FIR to reduce spectral leakage. Shown is the result of filtered signal and should be compared to figure 3 which is clipping without filtering.

Figure 4: PSD of the clipped and filtered signal, CR = 1.4 (from [4])

As the graph shows, the out-of-band interference is suppressed. However, filtering does cause peak regrowth, which is shown by the two graphs below (taken from [4]):

Nevertheless, the amount of peak regrowth is not enough to undermine the efforts of filtering. At the 99.9% point, the regrowth is 4 to 5 dB but still, the amplitudes are more concentrated at lower levels than the unclipped signal. After discussing the out-of-band interference, we should pay attention to the inband interference due to clipping. This introduces additional noise because the information contained in the clipped portion is lost. This additional noise can be modeled as a white Gausian noise if several events of clipping occurs within an OFDM symbol. This is the model used in [5] and it shows that this additional noise can be compensated by the reduced quantization noise of the A/D-D/A converters because of a reduction in

their dynamical ranges. It is shown in [5] that the signal-to-clipping noise power ratio is given by: where is the same as the clipping ratio (CR) defined above

Let (S / N)Q1 be the signal-to-quantization noise ratio without clipping and let (S / N)Q2 be the signal-to-quantization noise ratio after clipping. If the noise due to clipping is to be compensated, we want:

From this equation, we can determine the number of bits needed by the A/D to quantize the signal after clipping. It is shown by [5] that for N = 256 and AClip= (Amax / 6), the number of bits of the A/D-D/A can be decreased by more than 2 to achieve the same performance as if clipping was not applied. The above analysis is based on the assumption that the noise caused by clipping can be modeled by a white Guassian noise. If the clipping level is set high enough such that the event of clipping does not happen for every symbol interval, this assumption is no longer adequate. In [8], clipping noise is modeled as an impulsive noise to better describe the noise and the resulting performance can be orders of magnitude worse than the performance obtained by the white noise model. Therefore, at high clipping levels, the results of [5] cannot apply without modifications. C. Artificial Signals and Convex Optimization The last method we will discuss is the use of artificial signals to reduce the PAPR [7]. When our transmitter and receiver uses M-point FFT and IFFT, not all M frequencies carry data. Because of the lowpass filter at the receiver, only N < M number of carriers actually contain data. Thus, we have a few empty carriers per OFDM symbol. The basic premise of this technique is to add sine waves at these empty carrier frequencies in a way so that the composite OFDM symbol will have a lower PAPR. In [7], they set a desired maximum value of the envelope to be C and equate this to the expression for the envelope of the composite signal for one or two artificial signals. The

amplitudes, phases and frequencies of these artificial signals are found if the equation has valid roots. The result is in the graph below:

Figure 5: A comparison of PAPR under different conditions (from [7])

The PAPR can be reduced by 6 dB for 16 carriers with just two artificial signals. The ratio of the power of artificial to the power of data carriers is also tabulated and included in the table below: Table 2: The ratio of power of artificial signals to the power of data carriers. (from [7])

From the table, we see that we do not need too much extra power to send these artificial signals. In [7], the case of two artificial signals is analyzed. Convex optimization can be used to find the way to utilize all the empty carriers to make the PAPR a global minimum [6]. This turns out to be a second-order cone constraint problem. Using this method requires computing a convex optimization problem for every OFDM symbol. But with

the increasing computational power and proper algorithms, these solutions can be found efficiently.

IV. Conclusion
In this project, various ways of reducing the PAPR are summarized. Redundant coding is ideal for small number of carriers because it does not distort the signal at all. But as the number of carriers increases, coding becomes intractable. Clipping and filtering cause spectral splattering and introduce additional noise to the signal. The degradation of performance of this additional noise can be compensated by a smaller A/D-D/A quantization noise due to a reduced dynamical range through clipping. Artificial signals and convex optimization generate sine waves to be transmitted on the non-data-carrying frequencies so that the composite signal will have a reduced PAPR. Additional power is needed to transmit these signals and complex computation is needed for every OFDM symbol. Reference [1] van Nee, R.; de Wild, A.; Reducing The Peak-To-Average Power Ratio of OFDM, Vehicular Technology Conference, 1998. VTC 98. 48th IEEE, Volume:3, 18-21 May 1998, pages: 2072-2076 vol. 3 [2] Davide Dardari, Velio Tralli, and Alessandro Vaccari; A Theoretical Characterization of Nonlinear Distortion Effectis in OFDM Systems, IEEE Transactions On Communications, Vol. 48, No. 10, October, 2000 [3] Simon Shepherd, John Orriss, and Stephen Barton; Asymptotic Limits in Peak Envelope Power Reduction by Redundant Coding in Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplex Modulation, IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol. 46, No. 1, January 1998

[4] Xiaodong Li and Leonard J. Cimini, Jr.; Effects of Clipping and Filtering on the Performance of OFDM, IEEE, 1997 [5] Denis J. G. Mestdagh, Paul Spruyt and Bernard Biran; Analysis of Clipping Effect in DMT-based ADSL Systems, IEEE, 1994 [6] Meng, Teresa; EE 265 Lecture Notes [7] Yang Jun, Yang Jiawei and Li Jiandong; Reduction of the Peak-to-Average Power Ratio of the Multicarrier Signal via Artificial Signals, IEEE, 2000 [8] Ahmad R. S. Bahai, Manoneet Singh, Andrea J. Goldsmith, and Burton R. Saltzberg; A New Approach for Evaluating Clipping Distortion in Multicarrier Systems, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Vol. 20, No. 5, June 2002