Evaluation of Performance Improvement Capabilities of PAPR-reducing Methods

One of the major drawbacks of multicarrier modulation is the large envelope fluctuations which either require an inefficient use of high power amplifiers or decrease the system performance. Peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) is a very well known measure of the envelope fluctuations and has become the cost function used to evaluate and design multicarrier systems. Several PAPR-reducing techniques have been proposed with the aim to alleviate back-off specifications or increase the system performance. Besides the fact that these techniques have varying PAPR-reduction capabilities, power, bandwidth and complexity requirements, it is interesting to notice that the performance of a system employing these techniques has not been fully analyzed. In this paper we, first, develop a theoretical framework for both PAPR and the distortion introduced by a nonlinearity, and then simulate an OFDM system employing several well known PAPR-reducing techniques from the literature. By means of the theoretical analysis and the simulation results we will show the relation between PAPR and the performance of OFDM systems when a clipping device is present and we will evaluate the real performance improvement capabilities of the PAPRreducing methods. The agreement between the theoretical and the simulation results demonstrate the validity of the analysis.