International Journal of Applied Science and Engineering

2007. 5, 1: 75-80

The PAPR Reduction in OFDM System with the Help of Signal Mapping Scheme
Jyh-Horng Wen1, 2, Gwo-Ruey Lee1 and Cheng-Ying Yang3*
1

The Institute of Electrical Engineering, National Chung Cheng University

No.168, University Rd., Min-Hsiung, Chia-Yi, Taiwan, R.O.C.
2
Department of Electrical Engineering, Tunghai University
No. 181 Section 3, Taichung Harbor Rd., Taichung, Taiwan, R.O.C.
3
Department of Computer Science, Taipei Municipal University of Education
No.1, Ai-Guo W. Rd., Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.
Abstract: The non-linear distortion caused by high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of
transmitted signal is a major drawback in the OFDM systems. In this paper, the proposed PAPR
reduction scheme is to choose the corresponding symbol patterns with a low PAPR in the expanded signal space. However, the scheme has a high complexity for the selection of symbol
pattern with the smallest signal power in a larger expanded signal space. The scheme could be
realized as a signal mapping from the original information symbols to the corresponding patterns.
With the selection of the corresponded symbol patterns, the PAPR could be greatly reduced. According to the simulation results with the proposed scheme, while the length of the data frame is
16 and the signal expansion with adding 1 bit and 2 bits, the PAPR changing rate could be 20
percents and 16 percents of the original PAPA, respectively. However, there is no prominent improvement on PAPR reduction with more than 8 bits for using the signal expansion scheme.
Keywords: OFDM system; PAPR reduction scheme; Signal mapping scheme.
1. Introduction
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
(OFDM) technique has been applied into
many applications such as digital audio
broadcasting (DAB) systems, digital video
broadcasting terrestrial TV (DVB-T) systems,
asymmetric digital subscriber lines (ADSL),
wireless local area networks (WLAN),
broadband wireless access (BWA) networks
and ultra-wideband systems [1-4]. Moreover,
it could be expected to be the standard for the
Fourth Generation (4G) cellular system [5].
However, OFDM signal passes through a
non-linear high power amplifier (HPA) before
*

it is transmitted over the channel. When the

input signal exceeds a certain value, the output of the amplifier becomes saturated and,
then, the OFDM signal results a great degradation caused by the HPA [6, 7]. The HPA is
commonly considered be memoryless, which
means that the current output depends on the
current input only. For applications with
wider signaling bandwidths, however, the
memory effects of the whole system cannot
be ignored. [7] Especially, OFDM signal with
a high PAPR is sensitive to the non-linear
distortions caused by the HPA. The non-linear

Corresponding author; e-mail: [email protected]

Accepted for Publication: July 30, 2007

2007 Chaoyang University of Technology, ISSN 1727-2394

Int. J. Appl. Sci. Eng., 2007. 5, 1

75

Jyh-Horng Wen, Gwo-Ruey Lee and Cheng-Ying Yang

distortion in the HPA results in such negative

factors as (1) constellation warping which increase the bit error rate (BER) in the system
(2) spectrum outgrowth resulting in adjacent
channel interference (ACI) [6, 7]. In order to
reduce the non-linear distortion, many
schemes have been proposed to reduce the
PAPR of transmitted signal. Among those
PAPA reduction schemes, the simplest
method is to use the clipping process [1, 8, 9].
However, using clipping process causes both
in-band distortion and out-of-band distortion.
These undesired effects could be avoided with
a linear peak cancellation technique [1]. Besides, the forward-error-control coding applied scheme is another solution to the PAPR
reduction [1, 10]. Moreover, based on the
scrambling each OFDM symbol with different
phase, the small PAPR selection is provided
by symbol scrambling methods, such as selected mapping (SLM) method, partial transmitted sequence (PTS) method and subblock
phase weighting (SPW) method [11-14].
In this paper, a new PAPR reduction scheme
with the help of the signal mapping scheme is
proposed. The corresponding symbol patterns
are chosen with a low PAPR in the expanded
signal space. The scheme could be realized as
a signal mapping from the original information symbols to the corresponding patterns.
With the selection of the corresponded symbol patterns, the PAPR could be greatly reduced. In the following section, the OFDM
system with the proposed signal mapping
scheme is described. The numerical analysis
is shown in Section III. Finally, a conclusion
is given in Section IV.

sion to provide a high data rate transmission.

M-ary phase shift keying (PSK) or M-ary
quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM)
mapping scheme is modulated in each parallel
subcarrier to provide a different data rate service in the system. Besides, the IFFT and FFT
are employed to replace the banks of sinusoidal generator for the modulation and demodulation with different carrier frequencies
to reduce the complexity of OFDM modem
implementation [1, 2]. Additionally, consider
the signal mapping for signal space expansion,
the proposed OFDM system is shown in Figure 1.
First, source information is mapped with
M-ary PSK scheme to obtain a serial message
sequence. The message sequence a = [a0,
a1,, aK-1] with K symbols is converted into a
parallel form and called as a information
symbol. In order to choose the modulated
symbol patterns with low PAPRs, the information symbol is proposed to map the corresponding modulated symbol pattern x = (x0,
x1,, xN-2, xN-1) with N symbols in the expanded signal space. There are MN patterns in
the expanded signal space and MK patterns
with minimum PAPRs are chosen for mapping. The N parallel modulated symbols are
transformed by an IFFT to be a data symbol, s
= [s0, s1,., sN-1]. Then, the OFDM symbol is
transmitted over a channel. The PAPR of the
baseband OFDM transmitted symbol can be
defined as

2. The OFDM System with the Signal Mapping Scheme

where * indicates the complex conjugate,

max(sn) denotes the maximum value of sn and
E(snsn*) is the average power of data symbol
s. The probability density function (pdf) of
power of data symbol s, f n ( n ) , is

Basically, an OFDM system contains a series-to-parallel converter, a signal mapping

scheme and a fast Fourier transform (FFT)/
inverse FFT (IFFT) module [1, 2, 4]. The series and parallel converter is considered to
realize the concept of parallel data transmis76

Int. J. Appl. Sci. Eng., 2007. 5, 1

PAPR = max

0 n N 1

f n ( n ) = e n

(s s )
E (s s )
*
n

*
n

(1)

(2)

The PAPR Reduction in OFDM System with the Help of Signal Mapping Scheme

FFT to get the estimated modulated symbols.

The estimated modulated symbols are mapped
with corresponding demodulated scheme.
Then, the estimated source information is obtained.

where n = | sn sn* | is the power of the n-th

sample in the OFDM symbol and n is an i.i.d.
chi-squared distribution with 2 degrees of
freedom random variable [15, 16]. At the receiver, the received symbol are converted into
a parallel form and, then, transformed by a
Message
Sequence
Source
Information

Mary-PSK
Mapper

a = [ a0 ,..., aK 1 ]

Information
Symbol
a0
a1
Serial-toParallel
Converter

x0

s0

x1
Proposed
Mapper

aK 1

OFDM
Transmitted
Symbol

Data
Symbol

Modulated
Symbol

s1
IFFT

xN 2

sN 2

xN 1

Parallel-toSerial
Converter

sN 1

Channel

Estimated
Source
Information

Mary-PSK
Demapper

Parallel-toSerial
Converter

Received
Data
Symbol

Estimated
Modulated
Symbol

Estimated
Information
Symbol

Estimated
Message
Sequence

a0

x0

r0

a1

x1

r1

Proposed
De-mapper
a K 1

FFT
x N 2

rN 2

x N 1

rN 1

OFDM
Received
Symbol
r0 , r1 ,..., rN 2 , rN 1

Serial-toParallel
Converter

Figure 1. The block diagram of the FFT-based OFDM system

The signal expansion in the proposed mapping scheme could be considered as the
transferring the original information symbols
into the corresponding modulated symbol
patterns, as shown in Figure 2. In the figure,
there are MK possible information symbols in
the original signal space. These information
symbols should be mapped into those modulated symbol patterns with lower PAPRs in
the expanded signal space where there are MN
possible modulated symbol patterns. The circles with dash lines represent the symbol patterns with higher PAPRs. In the proposed
mapping scheme, with the selection of the
corresponded symbol patterns, the PAPR of
the OFDM transmitted signal could be greatly
reduced.

Original
signal space

Expanded
signal space

Figure 2. The concept of signal mapping in the

proposed scheme
In addition, the upper bound of PAPR with
the proposed scheme could be derived as bellows. Within mapping the symbol with K bits

Int. J. Appl. Sci. Eng., 2007. 5, 1

77

Jyh-Horng Wen, Gwo-Ruey Lee and Cheng-Ying Yang

to the symbol with K+b bits, the joint probability density function (pdf) is rewritten as

1
b

K
b
+
= ln 1 M

up bound

f ( 0 ,..., n ,..., K +b 1 ) =
f ( 0 ) f ( n ) f ( K +b 1 ) = e

K +b1

(3)

n =0

In the extended signal space, there are MK+b

symbol patterns could be selected for the MK
dedicated symbols. Hence, the MK minimum
PAPR symbol patterns could be chosen. Then,
the PAPR upper bound up-bound in the proposed scheme could be obtained with the Eq.
(4),

f ( 0 ,..., n ,..., K +b 1 < up bound ) =

n
e n=0 d 0 ...d n ...d K +b 1 =

1
= b
M
K +b

up bound

MK
M K +b

(4)

because there are MK symbol patterns should

be chosen among MK+b signal patterns. Besides, because n is an i.i.d. random variable,
Eq. (4) is satisfied.

f ( 0 ,..., n ,..., K +b 1 < up bound ) =

0 < up bound ,..., n < up bound ,
f

..., K +b 1 < up bound

(5)

(7)

where ln() denotes the logarithm function.

Based on this proposed scheme, the simulations are given in the following section.
3. Numerical Analysis

At the beginning, assuming the number of

subcarriers and the symbol number of information symbol to be 4 and 3 (i.e. N=4, K=3),
the number of the possible information symbols in the signal space and the possible
symbol patterns is 23 and 24 individually,
when the BPSK scheme is used. The histogram of PAPR in the 4-IFFT BPSK OFDM
system is shown in Figure 3. In the figure,
there are 24 possible symbol patterns. The
numbers of the pattern with PAPR=1,
PAPR=2 and PAPR=4 are eight, four and four,
individually. In the proposed scheme, the
symbol patterns within the minimum 8th
PAPR could choose as the possible corresponding symbol patterns in the proposed algorithm. Hence, the 8 patterns with PAPR=1
are chosen for mapping. The PAPR has been
reduced from 3 to 1 in the proposed scheme.
Besides, in Table 1, with the increase of parameter K and N, PAPR reduction is more
outstanding.
4 IFFT - BPSK
10
9

Then, the PAPR upper bound up-bound in the

proposed scheme could be obtained as

up bound

e 0 d 0

(e

K +b1

up bound

)d

K + b 1 =

e n d n

1
Mb

7
Numbers

up bound

(6)

6
5

78

Int. J. Appl. Sci. Eng., 2007. 5, 1

3
2
1
0

Hence, the upper bound of PAPR, up-bound,

could be obtained as

2
3
PAPR Value

Figure 3. The histogram of PAPR in the 4-IFFT

BPSK OFDM system

The PAPR Reduction in OFDM System with the Help of Signal Mapping Scheme

Table 1. PAPR of the conventional OFDM system and the OFDM system using the proposed method

Modulation scheme
(M-ary PSK)

3
3
7
7

4
4
8
8

BPSK
QPSK
BPSK
QPSK

The PAPR of the con- The PAPR of OFDM

ventional OFDM syssystem using the
tem with K subcarriers proposed method
3
1
3
2
7
2
7
2.25

In addition, this is assuming the symbol

number of information symbol to be16. With
adding bits, the PAPR changing rate is shown
in Figure 4. The PAPR changing rate is defined as a ratio between the maximum PAPR
value in the proposed scheme and the maximum one in original PAPR. Without adding
any bit, the maximum PAPR value is not
changed. While the length of the data frame is

16 and the signal expansion with adding 1 bit

and 2 bits, the PAPR is reduced from 16 to 3.2
and 2.6, individually. Thus, the PAPR changing rate could be 20 percents and 16 percents
of the original PAPA, respectively. However,
there is no prominent improvement on PAPR
reduction with more than 8 bits for the signal
expansion.

PAPR Changing Rate

0.8

0.6

0.4

0.2

0
0

10
The Added Bits, b

12

14

16

18

20

Figure 4. The PAPR changing rate in the proposed scheme

4. Conclusion

In this paper, a new scheme with signal

space expansion is proposed to reduce PAPR
of the OFDM transmitted signal. The scheme
could be realized as a signal mapping from
the original information symbols to the corresponding patterns. With the selection of the
corresponded symbol patterns, the PAPR
could be greatly reduced. While the length of

the data frame is 3 and the signal expansion

with adding 1 bit, the PAPR is reduced form 3
to 1 when the BPSK scheme is used. Besides,
with the increase of parameter K and N, PAPR
reduction is more outstanding. The PAPR
changing rate is large while the length of the
data frame is 16 and the signal expansion with
adding 1 bit. However, there is no prominent
improvement on PAPR reduction with more
than 8 bits for the signal expansion.
Int. J. Appl. Sci. Eng., 2007. 5, 1

79

Jyh-Horng Wen, Gwo-Ruey Lee and Cheng-Ying Yang

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