Enhanced nonlinear companding scheme for reducing PAPR of OFDM systems

A new companding scheme for reducing the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems is proposed in this study. It proceeds from speech signal processing similar to the earliest µ-law companding (MC) model. The proposed scheme compands (compresses and expands) the amplitudes of OFDM signals to a maximum of 1 V. Besides significantly reducing the PAPR, the proposed technique is also able to function as a limiter, thus reducing the system complexity and limiting the amplitudes of OFDM symbols to a unity maximum voltage, which does not exist in other companding PAPR techniques. Over frequency-selective fading channels with frequency domain equalization and using minimum mean square error (MMSE) to minimize the noise overhead, the proposed technique outperforms four other companding schemes over light and severe fading conditions. Finally, we demonstrate that PAPR reduction using companding can dispense with corresponding decompanding scheme at the receiver as it amplifies the distortion noise, thereby reducing the bit error ratio performance and increasing the receiver complexity. We investigate the out-of-band interference of the proposed scheme and also show that it outperforms the other existing techniques by up to 5 dB.