OFDM Symbol Design for Peak-to-Average Power Ratio Reduction Employing Non-Data Bearing Subcarriers

In this paper, we present a novel peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction algorithm for OFDM systems employing a symbol balancing approach with several non-data bearing (NDB) subcarriers. The proposed algorithm assigns the NDB subcarriers values that, when combined with interleaving, reduces the long correlation patterns of the input frame that can potentially lead to high PAPR. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm can use either a fixed number of NDB subcarriers or a variable number of NDB subcarriers according to the amount of inter-subcarrier correlation, thus attempting to increase the data throughput of the system. Simulation results for a 256-subcarrier OFDM system employing QPSK symbols and 16 interleavers can achieve a PAPR reduction of 4 dB for a complementary cumulative distribution of 0.01%.