Iterative soft compensation for OFDM systems with clipping and superposition coded modulation

Abstract—This paper deals with the clipping method used in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems to reduce the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). An iterative soft compensation method is proposed to mitigate the clipping distortion, which can outperform conventional treatments. The impact of signaling schemes on the residual clipping noise power is studied via the symbol variance analysis. It is found that superposition coded modulation (SCM) can minimize the residual clipping noise power among all possible signaling schemes. This indicates that SCM-based OFDM systems are more robust to clipping effect than other alternatives when soft compensation is applied. It is also shown that a multi-code SCM scheme can further reduce the clipping effect and its overall performance can be quickly evaluated using a semi-analytical evolution method. Numerical examples are provided to verify the analysis. Index Terms—Clipping, iterative decoding, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), soft compensation, superposition coded modulation (SCM). I