A New PAPR Reduction Scheme for OFDM Systems Based on Gamma Correction

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is perhaps the most spectrally efficient method discovered so far for communication systems and yet have an excellent immunity against multipath fading and inter-symbol interference. One of the major drawbacks of OFDM systems is their high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), which degrades system performance when nonlinear high power amplifiers (HPA) are employed. In this article, a new companding technique based on gamma correction (GC) function is proposed and analyzed. Through extensive computer simulations, it is shown that the proposed technique outperforms the previously suggested A-law and mu-law companding methods for PAPR reduction. A thorough investigation of GCC companding is presented in terms of computational complexity (CC), complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF), power spectral density (PSD), and bit-error-rate (BER). It is also shown that the proposed method is independent of modulation schemes and can be applied to any number of subcarriers.