Abstract
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals with large envelope fluctuations are prone to be affected by power amplifier (PA), resulting in degradation of system performance. Peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and cubic metric (CM) are commonly used as the reduction criteria of envelope fluctuations of OFDM signals. However, our analysis shows that minimizing the PAPR or CM does not necessarily mean the optimization of system performance, since both metrics are inadequate to quantify the distortion in nonlinear OFDM transmission. In this paper, we fully discuss the effects of PA nonlinearity on OFDM signals and propose a new metric called distortion component metric (DCM), which is closely related to the nonlinear distortion caused by the PA. We compare the system performance when several metrics are respectively used as the reduction criterion for the selective mapping scheme. It is shown that in the presence of memoryless or memory PA, the usage of DCM can provide better inband and out-of-band performance than PAPR and CM.
Optimum and Sub-Optimum Receivers for OFDM Signals with Strong Nonlinear Distortion Effects