Peak power characteristics of single carrier FDMA MIMO precoding system

A salient advantage of single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) is low peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) which is lower than that of OFDMA. Precoding using transmit beamforming (TxBF) is a MIMO spatial multiplexing method that increases the data throughput significantly. However, when applied to SC-FDMA, it increases the PAPR. In this paper, we describe how we can apply TxBF to an SC-FDMA system and show its effect on PAPR. We then consider the effects of precoder averaging across subcarriers and quantization, typically used to reduce feedback overhead, on the PAPR. Comparisons are made with single antenna, non-precoded spatial multiplexing (SM) and space-frequency block coding (SFBC) systems. Lastly, we show that a modest amount of amplitude clipping can reduce PAPR to an acceptable level with virtually no harmful effects on performance or spectral growth.