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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 56, NO. 2, JUNE 2010

Peak-to-Average Power Ratio Reduction of OFDM Signals

With Nonlinear Companding Scheme
Jun Hou, Jianhua Ge, Dewei Zhai, and Jing Li

AbstractCompanding transform is a simple and efficient

method in reducing the Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) of
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems. In
this paper, a novel nonlinear companding scheme is proposed to
reduce the PAPR and improve Bit Error Rate (BER) for OFDM
systems. This proposed scheme mainly focuses on compressing
the large signals, while maintaining the average power constant
by properly choosing transform parameters. Moreover, analysis shows that the proposed scheme without de-companding at
the receiver can also offer a good BER performance. Finally,
simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms
other companding scheme in terms of spectrum side-lobes, PAPR
reduction and BER performance.
Index TermsHigh power amplifier (HPA), nonlinear companding, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM),
peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR).

I. INTRODUCTION

UE to the advantages of high spectral efficiency, robustness to frequency selective fading channel and easy
implementation with Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) [1], [2], Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has gained
popularity in a number of applications including Digital Audio
Broadcasting (DAB), Terrestrial Digital Video Broadcasting
(DVB-T), the IEEE 802.11a standard for Wireless Local Area
Networks (WLAN) and the IEEE 802.16d standard for Wireless
Metropolitan Area Networks (WMAN).
However, some drawbacks are still unresolved in the OFDM
systems. One of the major problems is high Peak-to-Average
Power Ratio (PAPR) of transmitted OFDM signals. This high
PAPR forces the transmit power amplifier to have a large
back-off in order to ensure linear amplification of the signal,
which significantly reduces the efficiency of the amplifier. To
solve this high PAPR, many solutions have been presented in
the literature, which can be divided in two categoriesOne
category is to reduce the probability of generating high PAPR
signals before doing multicarrier modulation, such as coding
[3], Selective Mapping (SLM) [4], [5], and Partial Transmit

Manuscript received July 27, 2009; revised December 14, 2009; accepted
March 08, 2010. First published April 22, 2010; current version published
May 26, 2010. This work was supported by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China-Guangdong under Grant U0635003 and by the Program
for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University under
Grant IRT0852.
J. Hou, J. Ge, and J. Li are with the State Key Laboratory of Integrated
Services Networks, Xidian University, Xian 710071, China (e-mail: j.hou.xidian@gmail.com; jhge@xidian.edu.cn; jli@xidian.edu.cn).
D. Zhai is with Huawei Technologies Company Ltd., Xian 518129, China
(e-mail: zeal0502@yahoo.com.cn).
Color versions of one or more figures in this paper are available online at
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TBC.2010.2046970

Sequence (PTS) [6], [7]. And yet, most of these solutions

have restrictions on system parameters such as the number of
subcarriers, frame format, and constellation type. The other
category is to deal with the signals after multicarrier modulation, such as clipping [8] and the companding transform
[9][16], among which, the simplest and most widely used for
reducing the PAPR of OFDM signals is clipping. Nevertheless,
it causes additional clipping noise. In addition, this clipping
noise becomes very significant with high modulation orders and
seriously degrades the system performance [17], which makes
companding more suitable for high data rates applications. In
[9], Wang first proposed the -law companding scheme based
on speech processing, and it shows better performance than
the clipping. But by -law companding the OFDM signal, the
PAPR is reduced at the expense of an increase in the average
power. Later, a non-linear companding technique namely
exponential companding (EC) [12] has been developed to
overcome the problem of increasing average power and to have
efficient PAPR reduction. This scheme transforms the Rayleigh
distributed OFDM signal into a uniformly distributed signal
and achieves better system performance than the -law companding scheme. However, the distribution of large amplitude
signals is increased by the uniform companding. Hence, we
can predict that Bit Error Rate (BER) performance is degraded
when the OFDM transmitters employ a power amplifier with
heavy nonlinearity.
In this paper, a novel non-linear companding scheme is proposed. This scheme mainly focuses on compressing the large
signals, while maintaining the average power constant by properly choosing the transform parameters. Furthermore, theoretical analysis shows that the proposed scheme without de-companding operation at the receiver can also offer a good BER
performance. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed
scheme offers a better PAPR reduction and BER performance
than the EC scheme.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section II
describes a typical OFDM system model and formulates the
problem of high PAPR. Section III introduces the proposed
scheme and analyzes why the proposed scheme without
de-companding operation offers a good BER performance.
In Section IV, the performance of the proposed scheme is
compared with the EC scheme through simulation. Finally,
conclusions are given in Section V.
II. OFDM SYSTEM AND PROBLEM FORMULATION
Fig. 1 shows a generic OFDM system using the companding
technique, the whole system bandwidth is divided into many
orthogonal sub-channels (with narrow bandwidth), and data
symbols typically modulated by Phase Shift Keying (PSK)

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259

The Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) of

expressed as

can be

(5)
Fig. 1. Block diagram of an OFDM system with the companding transform.

The proposed companding scheme is given by

(6)

or Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) are transmitted

independently on the subcarriers.
denote the number of sub-carriers used for parallel
Let
denote the
information transmission and
th complex modulated symbol in a block of
information
symbols.
The outputs of the -point Inverse Fast Fourier Transform
are given by
(IFFT) of
(1)
Then, the power of OFDM signal

where
is the original OFDM signal and is the companded
only changes the
signal, the proposed companding function
amplitudes of input signals. Assume the transition point and the
are and , respectively. In the
cutoff point of the PDF of
, the PDF of
is similar to that of
; in the
interval
,
has a uniform distribution.
interval
has a Rayleigh distribution, the coordinates
Since
of the transition and cutoff point are
and
, respectively. Thereby, the PDF of
can be
expressed as
(7)

can be expressed as
(2)

and the CDF of

is

and the PAPR of OFDM signal in terms of power is defined as

(3)
where
returns the magnitude of
and
denotes the expectation operation. The peak power occurs when the modulated symbols are added with the same phase.

(8)
, we have
From the definition of the PDF
.
Consider a constant average power level in the non-linear
can be
companding operation, the power of OFDM signal
expressed as

III. PROPOSED SCHEME AND THEORETICAL ANALYSIS

(9)
A. Proposed Scheme
In this section, we propose a novel non-linear companding
technique that can effectively improve the BER performance
and reduce the PAPR of transmitted OFDM signals. Moreover,
the new scheme has the advantage of maintaining a constant
average power through the companding operation. Therefore,
the efficiency of the amplifier can be improved.
Assume the input information symbols are statistically independent and identically distributed. Based on the central limit
can be approximated as a complex Gaussian process
theory,
). Aswhen the number of sub-carriers is large (e.g.
has zero mean and variance , so its magnitude
sume that
has a Rayleigh distribution with the Probability Distribution Function (PDF) given by
(4)

The power of companded signal can be calculated as

(10)

.
By combining (9) and (10), we obtain
is a strictly monotonic increasing function,
Given that
we have

(11)

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 56, NO. 2, JUNE 2010

is
where is attenuation factor. Though the OFDM signal
not stationary, it has been shown in [18], [19] that an OFDM
signal guarantees to be time invariant. In [19], has been
given as
(17)

Consider a constant average power level in the companding

operation, we have

(18)
and the closer to 1, the
This formula illustrates that
smaller
will be. With the de-companding operation at the
is given by
receiver, the recovered signal

Fig. 2. Profiles of different companding schemes.

Considering the phase of input signal, the companding funcis given by

tion

(19)

where
denotes the sign function. Thus, the companding
function can be calculated as

,
.
where
For simplicity, we consider the OFDM system with the proposed scheme through AWGN channel. Adding guard interval
is ignored since it has no bearing on the analysis in this paper.
can be expressed
In an AWGN channel, the received signal
as

.
(13)

(20)

(12)

The de-companding function at the receiver is

is the channel noise.

where
With the de-companding operation, the recovered signal
at the receiver is
.

(14)
According to (3), the PAPR of the proposed scheme can be
shown as follows.

(15)
Fig. 2 depicts the profiles of EC and proposed companding
schemes. It can be obtained from this figure that the proposed
scheme can offer better PAPR reduction than the EC scheme.
B. Theoretical Analysis
According to [18], the extension of the Bussgang theorem to
complex or real Gaussian inputs can be written as the sum of
a useful attenuated input replica and an uncorrelated nonlinear
distortion noise. Thus, the companded signal can be modeled
as the aggregate of an attenuated signal component and companding noise , as expressed by
(16)

(21)
This formula shows that the de-companding operation amplifies
to
. Without the de-companding opthe channel noise
eration, the equivalent noise is composed of two parts: the comand the channel noise
. Then, the equivapanding noise
lent noise in the proposed scheme with and without the de-comand
, respecpanding operation can be written as
tively.
denote the attenuation factor of the proposed scheme.
Let
( is close to 1). From (18),
It was calculated that
we find that the proposed scheme results in little companding
noise. Therefore, it can be concluded that the proposed scheme
without the de-companding operation can also offer a good BER
performance.
IV. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
To compare the PAPR reduction and BER performance of the
proposed scheme with the EC scheme, the AWGN and fading
channels are assumed in the simulations. Furthermore, most
radio systems often employ High Power Amplifier (HPA) in
the transmitter to obtain sufficient transmit power [20]. For this

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 56, NO. 2, JUNE 2010

Fig. 3. Power spectrums of EC and proposed companded signals.

261

Fig. 5. BER performance of different companding schemes with HPA over

AWGN channel.

TABLE I
BER PERFORMANCE AND PAPR REDUCTION COMPARISON WITH DIFFERENT
COMPANDING SCHEMES

x: denotes without de-companding operation at the receiver.

Fig. 4. The CCDFs of original OFDM signal and companded signals.

reason, one WLAN HPA with model number AP 1093 produced by RF Integrated Corp. is employed here so that sufficient
transmit power can be achieved. We also considered the OFDM
, the factor of
system utilizing the number of subcarriers
and the randomly generated input data are
oversampling
modulated by Quaternary PSK (QPSK). No coder used in the
system, so the performance of the scheme can be clearly found.
Fig. 3 shows the spectrum side-lobes caused by the com),
panding schemes. Compared with the EC (with degree
the proposed scheme results in little spectral regrowth, which
can increase the immunity of OFDM signals from out-of-band
noise.
Figs. 4 and 5 plot the PAPR and BER performance of the
OFDM systems. Note that, the performance bound is obtained
by ignoring the effect of HPA and directly transmitting the original OFDM signals through the channel. It offers the best BER
performance, while it has an extremely high PAPR compared
with that of companded signals. The x in the figure denotes
without de-companding operation at the receiver. In the two figures, the proposed scheme achieves more PAPR reduction and
better BER performance than the EC scheme. To make comparisons, some results of the PAPR reduction and BER performance with different companding schemes are given in Table I.

Specially, in Table I, to achieve a BER of

, the minimum
is 8.58 dB (Performance bound). The rerequired
quired
s under the proposed, proposed without de-companding, EC and EC without de-companding schemes are 9.43
dB, 9.01 dB, 11.42 dB and 9.08 dB, respectively. In addition, the
PAPR of the proposed scheme is 4.25 dB while the EC scheme is
4.80 dB. It is also observed that compared with the performance
bound, the BER performance of the proposed scheme only results in 0.5 dB performance degradation.
Fig. 6 depicts the BER performance of different companding
schemes with HPA over fading channel, with comparison to that
of the original OFDM scheme. As shown in Fig. 6, it can be
observed that the BER performance of the proposed scheme is
also robust enough in the fading channel.
Fig. 7 shows the BER performance of companding schemes
with different operations at the receiver. The x in the figure
denotes without de-companding operation at the receiver. It was
regimes, QPSK can achieve good
shown that under low
BER performance, and the impact of the amplified channel
noise caused by de-companding operation is worse than that of
the non-linear distortion caused by the companding. Therefore,
QPSK without de-companding operation achieves better BER
is
performance. For the case of 16-QAM, only when
larger than 12.5 dB, the impact of the non-linear distortion
is worse than that of the amplified channel noise. Thus, the
proposed scheme with de-companding operation offers better

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for
their valuable comments which helped to improve the presentation of the paper.
REFERENCES

Fig. 6. BER performance of different companding schemes with HPA over

fading channel.

Fig. 7. BER performance of companding schemes with different operations at

the receiver.

BER performance. Similar situation also occurred in the condition of EC scheme. These simulation results demonstrate
that the proposed companding scheme without de-companding
operation can offer a good BER performance.

V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have proposed and evaluated a novel
non-linear companding scheme that can effectively improve the
OFDM system performance with low out-of-band distortion.
Additionally, theoretical analysis shows that the proposed companding scheme without de-companding operation also offers
a good BER performance. Simulation results have shown that
the proposed companding scheme could offer better system
performance in terms of PAPR reduction, power spectrum and
BER performance than the EC scheme.

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