A peak-to-average power ratio reduction technique for the IEEE 802.11a wireless LAN

In this paper, we propose a simple and effective peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction method for the IEEE 802.11a wireless local area network. Usually some unused subcarriers defined in the IEEE 802.11a standard are set to zero to prevent out-of-band radiation. However, without violating the transmit spectrum mask in the standard, it is shown that we can transmit nonzero values on some of these unused subcarriers. We propose an algorithm to reduce the PAPR of the transmitted signal by setting appropriate values to some of these unused subcarriers. Computer simulation results show that the transmitted signal processed by the proposed method has a better PAPR distribution and meets the transmit spectrum mask defined in the IEEE 802.11a standard.