IEBE TRANSACrIONS ON BROAUCASTING.

Vol.. 4s. NO. 3 . SBI'TEMRFX

1999

301

Reduction of Peak-to-Average Power Ratio of OFDM System Using A Companding Technique

Xianbin Wang, Student MemberJEEE, T. T. Tjhung', Senior Member, IEEE and C. S.Ng, Member, IEEE Dept. of Electrical Engineering, National University of Singapore, I O Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore 119260 Republic of Singapore Email: elettt@nus.edu.sg, TEL: +65-8742115

Abstract: A companding technique is proposed to reduce the peak-to-average-power ratio of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal in this paper. The probability density function of the amplitude of OFDM signal is determined. Because of the Gaussian distribution of OFDM signal, companding technique can be quite effective, since large OFDM signal only occnrs infrequently. The peak-to-average power ratio of an OFDM system and the optimal companding coefficient are determined in this paper. Symbol error rate of the systems after the companding is derived. The performances of the system with and without the companding are also compared.

A QAM-OFDM system diagram is shown in Figure I The incoming bit stream is packed into x bits per symbol to form a complex number s,, where x is determined by the QAM signal constellation. For a real sequence output at the IDFT, the complex input to the IDFT has Hermitian symmetry and is constrained as follows[7]:
SM.& = s;

(1)

where k=O, I , ......, (ND)-l, and S(O)=O. Suppose N is even and s, = a , - jb, , the output of the IDFT is:

I. Introduction
OFDM has several properties which make it an attractive modulation scheme for digital TV broadcasting[ 1.21, such as immunity to impulse noise and intersymbol intcrference (ISI), low complexity and high spectral efficiency. One major difficulty, however, is its large peak-to-average power (PAP) ratio, which reduces the resolution of the digital-to-analog (D/A) and analog-todigital (A/D) converters in the transmitter and receiver. To reduce the PAP ratio, several techniques have been proposed, such as clipping[3] and coding[4,5]. Clipping is the simplest technique hut it causes additional clipping noise which degrades the system performance. Coding seems attractive, but to date no good coding solutions are known which can maintain a reasonable coding ratc for arbitrary numbers of subcarriers[6]. A simple but effective companding technique to reduce the peak-to-average power ratio of OFDM signal is proposed in this paper. The idea comes from the use of companding in speech processing. Since OFDM signal is similar to speech signal in the sense that large signals only occur very infrequently, the same companding technique might bc used to improve OFDM transmission performance.
11. Theoretical Analysis
Pulilisher Itcm ldontifier S 0018~9316~9~)118878~2

From the central limit theorem it follows that for large values of N , the samples of OFDM signal s(n) bccomes Gaussian distributed[6]. To determine the probability density function of the OFDM signal, the variance of the signal has to be determined. And this can be obtained with the following equation:

(3) whereE' = -I E ( ~ ;+@is the symbol energy in each

2

subcarrier. Therefore, the probability density function of OFDM signal can be written as:

Thus OFDM signal possesses a similar property with speech signal. The d a w companding technique can then be introduced. The samples of OFDM signal s(n) are companded before it is converted into analog waveform.

fl0IR-93Ihll)9R1fl.flflO 1999 IEHR

,. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...........................................................
Serial Bit-to Symbol F Packing and + r m (modulator) Channel Coding

--+
!
i

+parallel/serial 3
& insertion of

+ -

guard Interval

........................................................... ..........................................................

Noise and Interference

Channel

For thc convenience of analysing the effect of quantization, we only consider one OFDM symbol. After companding, the signal now becomes s-(n):

Substituting

(5)

into
we get:

(8)

and

note

that

s~~(~,(~)) = s&(~)),

A is a normalisation constant such that

fi
I A l

After

s'(n)=

J
Spl(s. (n))a

D/A conversion, the signal is transmitted through the channel. At the receiver end, the received signal is first converted into digital form. The sampling result is:

- [A+ -

u)s(n)l]exp[q(n) + w(n)]B)- A

where q is the analog to digital conversion error and w the AWGN. The variance of quantization error can be determined as:
a2=-=p

<'

Q2

12

(+))
12

Asgn(s,(n)) With Taylor's series, the exponential function can bc expanded as: expfldn)+ w(n)]B) 1+ [ d n ) + w(n)]B + { d n ) + w(n)yB' +...... 2 !
~

B=

In(1 + U)

(7)

where Q and L are the quantization interval and wordlength of AID converter. The received signal has to be expanded before it is sent to the FFT block. The expanding equation is:
Aeip{ bc(n)+ 4(n) + w(n)lln(l
s'h) =
+

(10)

Since the quantization error is usually very small, the higher order terms in thc above equation is much smaller than the second term, and can be neglected. Thc expanded signal can be approximated as:
s'(n) o s(n)

ASgn(s, ( 1 1 ) )
Sgn(s,(n))u

(*)

+ 'q(n)+ w(n)lAB + s(n)[q(n)+ w(n)]B

(11)

So to recover the original data, the expanded samples s'(nJ are sent to FIT block. The decision variable for the kth suhcarrier is: 1 N-l --I**"
~,,,(k)

=-x %E
N-l

s'(rr)e

n-0

= -%E n-0n ) + x(s(

=

[q(n)+ w(n)lAB + s(n)[q(n) + w(n)]B

277k.l

. ,2d.I
N

+cos?-

2z.k.2 og + sinz*a,r N N
N

2nkn L g [ u ecos-+

b,

......+COS 2 277k(-1+ N/2)+sin22nk(-I+N/Z))li2

1 N I +-xq(n)

4% n=o
"4

[A~B -+s(n)B

N
e
= (N

-2)E

4%

The peak value of OFDM signal A is the maximum of

(12)
The variance of the AWGN now becomes:

Meanwhile, the avcrage powcr of

OFDM signal can also detcrmincd as:

due In most cases, this variance will he smaller than 0;. to the compression effect caused by expanding. With the central limit theorem, the second term in the above equation can bc regarded as B Gaussian random variahlc with variance o f Therefore, the optimal U can he derived as:

(17)

2 ~ u ~ l n + U() l i
IlA

Because

the

equality

holds

when

An error will occur if the noise components are larger than half the distance between two points in the constelllation[ll. Taking only the real or imaginary part of the decision variable as they are symmetrical, the symbol error rate system without quantization error and with quantization error can he expressed as:

error is minimized when

U z = - A'
~

It is obvious that U is and

e=- 4- 22z N

N-,

'[=)
D
(19)

E+:) the square root of peak-to-average power ratio, We can i s almost always see that the minimum of the variance

less than the variance of the quantization noise without as long as 21n*(lt u ) I . < companding,
12

Now to gel the optimal companding, the peak-toaverage power ratio has to he determined, Assume that
. ~ ( ~ I ) = - ~ ( u ~ c 2 ds - + + ~ ~2 d~ - ) = . ~ .where 1 o " ~ n ~'

whereD=%
(C-1)

(20) is the minimum distance between two

K.,
ji-1

fi

s and 1 are

adjacent constellation points with Czthe total number of constellation points, and ,;,)are the variance of real or imaginary part of AWGN and quantization noises and is the error function with:

two vectors with the forms o f s = (a,,b, u 2 . b2,.......u l X I z ) ~ , , bl,,,)-,

I

1
I

e(.)

,sin--, cos

2d.l

cos-.

2n.k.2 . 277k.2 sin,...... N N

2nk(-It N / 2 ) , sin 2mb(-1+ N 1 2 ) N N

3116

11 1.

Results and Discussions:

Thc temporal waveforms of OFDM signal before and after companding are plotted in Figure 2. Thc input data is gcnerated using a random source. As we can see, the amplitudes of small signals are enlarged while the peaks remain unchanged after companding. Therefore, the avcrage power is increased and the peak-to-averagcpower ratio is rcduced. The probability density function o l OFDM signal is plotted in Figure 3. The p.d,$ is obtained by discretizing the OFDM signal and counting the number of cach discrete value occurs in the OFDM signal. The p.d$ of OFDM signal before companding is turned ant to be Gaussian as we expected. Because the companding rate is largest when s(n)=O, there is a local minimum in the p.d.$ at s(n)=O after companding. The shape of the p.d.$ of the OFDM signal is also related to the numbcr of the carricrs used in the OFDM signal. Sincc the OFDM signal is the summation of the signals from all the snbcarriers, the largcr carrier number is, the closer of the OFDM signal to a Gaussian random variable. Thc relationship between the quantization error and the companding coefficient U is illustrated in Figure 4. The larger thc companding coefficient is, thc more the small OFDM signals will bc enlargcd. The companding technique improves the quantization resolution of small signals at the price of thc reduction of the resolution of large signals since small signals occur more frequently than large ones. Howevcr, as the companding increases the number of thc quantization intervals far small signals, the number of the qunatization intervals available for large signal will inevitably be reduced since the total number of the quantization intervals remains unchanged after companding. Therefore, there cxists an optimal companding coefficient. As shown in the figure, the optimal cocfficients are .\lM-2
8
6

Figure 5 illustrates the symbol error rate (SER) performance before and after the companding, The wordlength of AID converter for curve 1, 3, 4 and 5 is 10 bits. Curve 2 represents the SER performance without quantization error. As expected, the companded pcrformances are better than the uncompanded one (curve 1). The compression effect on AWGN from thc expanding process can also be seen in curves 3, 4 and 5. The extend of improvement is largest when the companding coefficient is JN-2. This result agrees with our analysis in Section 11.

0.018

Amplitude Figure 3. Probability Density function of the amplitude of 16-QAM OFDM signal with N=256 (cureve 1) and companded waveform (curve 2, ~16).

0
-2

-4
-6

-81 1

'

'

I
61

lo*

50

i w

150

2 w

250

21

41

81

101

121

Figurc.2 Temporal waveform of 16-QAM OFDM signal (dashed line) with N=256, compared with the companded signal (solid line, u=16)

Figure. 4 Relationship between quantization error and companding coefficients for 16-QAM OFDM signal. The number of carriers for the three cnrves 1 , 2 and 3 are 128,256 and 512, respectively.

307

10 0

101

E
10'1

Limiting Codes for OFDM", 48"' IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, 18-21, May, 1998, Ottawa, pp.208 1-2084. 6. Rechard van Nee and Arnout de Wild, "Rcdocing the Peak-to-Average Power Ratio of OFDM", 48Ih IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, 18-21, May, 1998, Ottawa, pp 2072-2076. 7. Antonio Ruiz, John M. Cioffi and Sanjay Kasturia, "Discrete Multiple Tone Modulation with Coset Coding for the Spectrally Shaped Channel", IEEE Trans. Commun., June, 1992, Vol. 40, pp 1012-1029.

10.1

Figure.5 Error probability Performance of the 16QAM OFDM system with N=256. The companding coefficients for curves I , 3, 4, and 5 are 0, 16, 100 and 255, respectively. Thc wordlength is assumed to be 10 bits. Quantization noise is omitted in curve 2.

Xianhin Wang received his B.Sc. degree in electronics and information science from Lanzhou University, China in 1993 and M S c . degree from the same university in 1996. From 1997, he has been a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical Engineering Department, National University of Singapore. His current research areas include Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Loop, multicarricr modulation, and digital signal processing. His is currcntly a research engineer with NUS. T. T. Tjhung received the B.Eng. and M.Eng. degree in electrical engineering from Carleton Universtiy, Ottawa, ON, Canada, in 1963 and 1965, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from Queens University, Kingston, ON, Canada, in 1969. From 1963 to 1968 he worked with AcresInterTel, Ltd., Ottawa, as a Consultant where his work was concerned with FSK systems Cor secure radio communication. In 1969 he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering , National University of Singapore, Singapore, where he is currcntly a Professor. His present research interests are in bandwidth-efficient communication systems. From 1977 to 1983 he was a Consultant to Singapore Telecom on the planning and implementation of their optical fiber wide-band network. Dr. Tjhung is a member of IEICE Japan and a fellow of IES Singapore. He is also a member of the Association of Professional Engineers of Singapore.
C. S. Ng received the B.Eng. (Hons.) degrec from thc University of Singapore in 1978, the M.Eng. degree from the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 1982 and the Ph.D. dcgree from the University of WisconsinMadison in 1988, a11 in electrical engineering. From 1978 to 1981 he held the appointment of Staff Electrical Engineer at LeBlond Asia Pte. Ltd., which is a subsidiary of LeBlond Inc., Cincinnati, OH. In 1981, hc joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at the NUS and has been an Associate Professor sincc 1998. His current research interests include digital signal processing with applications to speech and radar, and bandwidthefficient digital modulation techniques for mobile radio. Dr. Ng was a recipient of a NUS Overseas Graduate Scholarship. He is currently serving as vice-chairman of the Communications Chapter, IEEE Singapore Section, and treasurer of the M'ITIAPEMC Chapter, IEEE Singapore Section.

IV. Conclusions
A simple hut effective companding technique to reduce the peak-to-average power ratio of OFDM signal is proposed in this paper, The probability density funclion of the OFDM signal is determined in this paper. To improve the performance of the companding, optimal companding coefficient is determined. The error probability performance of the system before and after the adoption of the companding technique arc calculated and compared. The result shows that companding is an effective technique to reduce the peak-to-average-power ratio of OFDM systems.

References 1. Tristan de Couasnon, Raoul Monnier and Jean Bernard Rault, "OFDM for digital TV broadcasting", Signal processing, 1994, Vol. 39, pp 1-32 2. William Y. Zou and Yiyan Wu, "COFDM: an overview", lEEE Trans. On Broadcasting, Mar., 1995, Vol. 41, pp 1-8. 3. Dukhyun Kim and Gordon L. Stuber, "Clipping Noise Mitigation for OFDM by Decision-Aided Reconstruction", IEEE Communications Letters, 1999, Vol. 3, pp 4-6. 4. Simon Shepherd, John Orriss, and Stephcn Barton, "Asympotic Limits in Peak Envelope Power Reduction by Redundant Coding in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplcxing", IEEE Trans. On Communications, 1998, Vol. 46, pp 5-10. 5 . Alex J. Grant and Richard van Nee, "Efficient Maximum Likihood Decoding of Peak Power