Non-symmetric decompanding for improved performance of companded OFDM systems

Recent work in literature suggests the use of companding transforms to reduce the Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR) of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems. However, previous performance evaluations assume the availability of infinite bandwidth. In bandlimited conditions, the performance deteriorates as a result of filtering out the Out-of-Band Radiation (OBR). In this letter, we first study the effect of filtering on the performance of various companding techniques. We further propose a simple yet very effective method to overcome this performance degradation. The essential idea is to use companding and decompanding transforms which are not exact inverse of each other. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the previous schemes under more realistic channel conditions.