PAPR Reduction Scheme with SOCP for MIMO-OFDM systems

International audienceCombination of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has become a promising candidate for high performance wireless communications. However one major disadvantage of MIMO-OFDM systems lies in a prohibitively large peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of the transmitted signal on each antenna. In this paper we extend from SISO to MIMO systems a method based on allocating dedicated subcarriers for PAPR mitigation. These subcarriers are located on unused subcarriers of OFDM spectrum under the assumption they all fall under the power mask. This is originally implemented with a SOCP optimization algorithm applied before space time coding scheme. This jointly mitigates PAPR on each MIMO branch scheme. This approach does not degrade the bit-error-rate (BER) and the data bit rate and no side information (SI) transmission is required. Simulation results are presented in the IEEE 802.16 WiMAX standard context: an Alamouti space time code with two transmitted antennas and 256 OFDM subcarriers are considered where 56 of which are unused and allocated for PAPR reduction. PAPR gains up to 7dB are obtained depending on mean power increase limitation. Moreover, with a spectrum mask constraint, this method is standard compliant