Nonlinear distortion reduction for the improvement of the BER performance in OFDM communication systems

Abstract

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been used widely in many communication systems. However, the major drawback of OFDM is the high peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR) which results in the bit error rate (BER) performance degradation in nonlinear environments. In this paper, we introduce a new phase weighting method to reduce the nonlinear distortion of OFDM signals in the nonlinear high power amplifier, which is different from the well-known PAPR reduction method. Especially, the proposed method is based on the nonlinear distortion reduction criterion rather than the conventional PAPR reduction criterion so that we can improve the BER performance more effectively. The simulation results show that the BER performance of the OFDM system using the proposed method is better than that of the ordinary OFDM and other OFDM systems using the PAPR reduction criterion.