Performance Investigation of Peak Shrinking and Interpolating the PAPR Reduction Technique for LTE-Advance and 5G Signals

Abstract

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has become an indispensable part of waveform generation in wideband digital communication since its first appearance in digital audio broadcasting (DAB) in Europe in 1980s, and it is indeed in use. As has been seen, the OFDM based waveforms work well with time division duplex operation in new radio (NR) systems in 5G systems, supporting delay-sensitive applications, high spectral efficiency, massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) compatibility, and ever-larger bandwidth signals, which has demonstrated successful commercial implementation for 5G downlinks and uplinks up to 256-QAM modulation schemes. However, the OFDM waveforms suffer from high peak to average power ratio (PAPR), which is not desired by system designers as they want RF power amplifiers (PAs) to operate with high efficiency. Although NR offers some options for maintaining the efficiency and spectral demand, such as cyclic prefix based (CP-OFDM), and discrete Fourier transform spread based (DFT-S-OFDM) schemes, which have limiting effects on PAPR, the PAPR is still as high as 13 dB. This value increases when the bandwidth is increased. Moreover, in LTE-Advance and 5G systems, in order to increase the bandwidth, and data-rate, carrier aggregation technology is used which increases the PAPR the same way that bandwidth increment does; therefore, it is essential to employ PAPR reduction in signal processing stage before passing the signal to PA. In this paper, we investigate the performance of an innovative peak shrinking and interpolation (PSI) technique for reducing peak to average power ratio (PAPR) in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based signals at waveform generation stage. The main idea behind the PSI technique is to extract high peaks, scale them down, and interpolate them back into the signal. It is shown that PSI technique is a possible candidate for reducing PAPR without compromising on computational complexity, compatible for existing and future telecommunication systems such as 4G, 5G, and beyond. In this paper, the PSI technique is tested with variety of signals in terms of inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) length, type of the signal modulation, and applications. Additional work has been carried out to compare the proposed technique with other promising PAPR reduction techniques. This paper further validates the PSI technique through experimental measurement with a power amplifier (PA) test bench and achieves an adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) of less than –55 dBc. Results showed improvement in output power of PA versus given input power, and furthermore, the error vector magnitude (EVM) of less than 1 % was achieved when comparing of the signal after and before modification by the PSI technique.