PAPR reduction of OFDM through pilot shifting

Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR) of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a long-standing problem which has been hindering its performance for decades. In this paper, we propose a new PAPR reduction scheme based on shifting pilot locations among the data symbols. Since no side information is sent to the receiver about the pilot locations, a novel pilot detection algorithm is devised exploiting the pilot power and the relative constant distance property of pilots. The proposed scheme attains around 2 dB PAPR reduction. The pilot detection accuracy is shown to be very excellent ranging from 80% to 99% at 0 dB of Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) in different parameters. This scheme is very spectrally efficient with reduced complexity without degrading BER performance significantly.