A Novel Alternating μ-Law Companding Algorithm for PAPR Reduction in OFDM Systems

Abstract

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) inherits multi-carrier systems’ inevitable high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) problem. In this paper, a novel alternating companding technique is proposed to combat the harassment of high PAPR. The sequential μ-law companding (SULC) and a tone with a lower PAPR result in only partial tones needing companding. The SULC scheme’s PAPR and bit error rate (BER) performance has been balanced and improved. However, the computational complexity is still too high to be implemented. Therefore, this study sorted the transmission signals according to their amplitudes. Then, all the tones are divided into two groups by estimating the rough companding amount (around 54% of the subcarriers), using traditional parallel companding for the first group and the other group only by partial μ-law companding. This alternating μ-law companding (AULC) is proposed to improve the PAPR performance and simultaneously reduce complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed AULC method appreciably reduces the PAPR by about 5 dB (around 45%) compared with the original μ-law at complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF) equal to 10−4. Moreover, it only requires a moderate complexity to outperform the other companding schemes without sacrificing the BER performance in the OFDM systems.