Suppression of sidelobes in OFDM systems by multiple-choice sequences

In this paper, we consider the problem of out-of-band radiation in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems caused by high sidelobes of the OFDM transmission signal. Suppression of high sidelobes in OFDM systems enables higher spectral efficiency and/or co-existence with legacy systems in the case of OFDM spectrum sharing systems. To reduce sidelobes, we propose a method termed multiple-choice sequences (MCS). It is based on the idea that transforming the original transmit sequence into a set of sequences and choosing that sequence out of the set with the lowest power in the sidelobes allows to reduce the out-of-band radiation. We describe the general principle of MCS and out of it we derive and compare several practical MCS algorithms. In addition, we shortly consider the combination of MCS sidelobe suppression method with existing sidelobe suppression methods. Numerical results show that with MCS approach OFDM sidelobes can be reduced significantly while requiring only a small amount of signalling information to be sent from transmitter to receiver. For example, in an OFDM overlay scenario sidelobes power is reduced by around 10 dB with a signalling overhead of only 14%. Copyright (c) 2006 AEIT.