Shaping code in conjunction with DCT for PAPR reduction in multicarrier system

Abstract Nonlinear behavior and power efficiency of the Power Amplifier (PA) contradictorily depend on the input signal amplitude distribution. The transmitted signal in multi-carrier modulation exhibits high Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) and large bandwidths, leading to the degradation of the radio link and additional generation out-of-band interferences, which degrade the quality of the transmission. Practical solutions exist, like a power back-off, but with unacceptable efficiency performances of the transmitter. This paper deals with efficiency and linearity improvement using a new PAPR reduction method based on the combination of Discrete Cosine Transform and shaping technique. The main principle is to determine an optimal coding scheme according to a trade-off between coding complexity and performance benefits in the presence of PA nonlinearities. Simulation and experimental results in the context of OFDM signal and using a 20 W–3.7 GHz Radio-Frequency Power Amplifier show an improvement on PAPR reduction of about 3.25 dB. Also, the communication criteria like Bit Error Rate and Error Vector Magnitude are improved by about one decade and a half and $$8\%$$ 8 % , respectively.