Peak-to-Average Power Ratio Management in OFDM Communication Systems

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has become a foundational technology for broadband wireless and wired communication, owing to its resilience against multipath fading and high spectral efficiency. A defining challenge of OFDM is its inherently high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), which compels radio frequency power amplifiers (HPAs) to operate near their non-linear region. This non-linearity not only introduces in-band distortion and out-of-band emissions but also degrades amplifier efficiency, driving up energy consumption and thermal load. To mitigate these effects, a diverse suite of PAPR management strategies has been devised. Distortion-based approaches such as clipping and filtering impose direct peak suppression but require compensation to recover signal integrity. Signal-representation methods—including Partial Transmit Sequence (PTS) and Selective Mapping (SLM)—optimise phase rotations or map candidate waveforms to identify the representation with the lowest PAPR. Companding transforms non-linearly compress the amplitude range, while hybrid schemes combine multiple techniques to balance complexity, distortion and spectral containment. Recent work has extended these methods to emerging scenarios—such as non-orthogonal multiple access, multi-numerology operation and large-scale MIMO—ensuring compatibility with 5G deployments and informing the design of future 6G networks. Effective PAPR management thus underpins the development of more efficient HPAs, prolongs battery life in mobile terminals, and enhances link reliability in satellite and broadcast systems.

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Peak-to-Average Power Ratio Management in OFDM Communication Systems publication trend

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Technical terms

Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR): the ratio of the maximum instantaneous power to the average power of a transmitted signal.

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM): a multi-carrier modulation scheme that divides a data stream across orthogonal subcarriers to mitigate frequency-selective fading.

High Power Amplifier (HPA): an RF component that boosts the power of a signal for transmission, whose efficiency is sensitive to high PAPR.

Clipping and Filtering: a PAPR reduction approach where signal peaks are truncated (clipped) and then filtered to remove out-of-band distortion.

Partial Transmit Sequence (PTS): a method that partitions an OFDM block into subblocks and optimises phase rotations to minimise PAPR.

Selective Mapping (SLM): a technique that generates multiple equivalent OFDM signal candidates with different phase sequences and selects the one with the lowest PAPR.

Companding: a non-linear amplitude mapping that compresses the dynamic range of a signal to reduce peaks and mitigate PAPR.

References

1. Low-complexity selective mapping technique for PAPR reduction in downlink power domain OFDM-NOMA. EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing (2023).
2. Performance Analysis and Comparison of Clipped and Filtered OFDM Systems With Iterative Distortion Recovery Techniques. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (2021).
3. Novel Iterative Clipping and Error Filtering Methods for Efficient PAPR Reduction in 5G and Beyond. IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society (2020).