An Adaptive Companding Scheme for Peak-to-average Power Ratio Reduction in OFDM Systems

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals suffer from the problem of high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), which complicates the design of analog front-end of the system. Companding is a well-known PAPR reduction technique that involves transforming signal amplitudes using a deterministic function. OFDM signal amplitude, on average, is Rayleigh distributed but the distribution can vary significantly from symbol to symbol, especially when constellation size increases. In this paper, a new adaptive companding scheme is proposed along with its design methodology aiming at optimizing the compander performance by accommodating this variation in its design. This is achieved by designing compander parameters separately for statistically dissimilar symbols in OFDM waveform and making the compander select from these parameters, during run-time, according to the features of input symbols.