Peak-to-average power ratio reduction using second order cone programming based tone reservation for terrestrial digital video broadcasting systems

High peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) is a critical issue in any multicarrier systems using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, as terrestrial digital video broadcasting (DVB). It can result in low power efficiency and large performance degradation of systems, due to the nonlinearity of high-power amplifier (HPA). A PAPR reduction method based on tone reservation technique with second-order cone programming (SOCP) approach in terrestrial DVB systems is proposed. The authors first demonstrate the superiority of the SOCP optimisation algorithm compared with an iterative gradient-based algorithm, using the current DVB-T parameters: significant PAPR reduction gains can be achieved with only a very small set of subcarriers in the useful bandwidth, making the proposed method more promising in terms of spectral efficiency. Moreover, the proposed solution presents a very good trade-off between PAPR reduction gain and mean transmitted power increase. An overall study, taking into account the limitation of the power level of the dedicated subcarriers and the evaluation of the performances in presence of a nonlinear HPA, is presented. These performances are given in terms of adjacent channel power ratio and bit error rate. The resulting PAPR reduction gain demonstrates that the relevance of the proposed method for the future DVB-T standard is straightforward.