Design of Reed-Solomon Codes for OFDM Systems with Clipping and Filtering

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has become a popular technique because of its robustness against multipath fading and high bandwidth efficiency. However, OFDM signals have a critical drawback; their peak-to-average power ratio (PAR) is very high compared to that of single-carrier signals. The clipping and filtering method is an effective method to cope with such a problem. However, as the required transmission rate increases with high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), clipping distortion becomes dominant and causes burst errors. In this paper, we study a use of Reed-Solomon (RS) code for mitigating the clipping distortion. It is shown that judicious selection of the code parameters can improve the overall system performance. The decoding error rate as well as achievable throughput of the proposed system is calculated based on the combination of theoretical analysis and computer simulations.