Selective vector perturbation precoding and peak to average power ratio reduction for OFDM systems

High peak to average power ratio (PAPR) is a serious drawback for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system as it reduces the efficiency of high-power amplifiers commonly used in the transmitter and causes spectral spillage. OFDM transmissions are also sensitive to frequency selective fading channels which can severely attenuate certain parts of the signal making it much more vulnerable to additive noise. This paper proposes an effective precoding technique with the dual ability to both reduce PAPR and condition the OFDM signal against frequency selective fading channels. It will be demonstrated that by advisedly creating diversity among the subcarriers of one OFDM symbol, and exploiting it with a dirty- paper-coding (DPC) approach, excellent bit-error-rate (BER) performance is achieved without reducing transmission rate. Low PAPR factor can also be obtained through a proper selection of diversity matrix that distributes the power of each modulated symbol over the OFDM block. Simulation results show that the proposed technique has not only better BER performance than the ordinary channel inversion but also similar PAPR reduction ability to the selective mapping (SLM) technique. © 2008 IEEE.