Quasi-Optimal Tone Reservation PAPR Reduction Algorithm for Next Generation Broadcasting Systems: A Performance/Complexity/Latency Tradeoff With Testbed Implementation

High peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of the transmitted signal is a serious issue in multicarrier communication systems, such as second generation terrestrial digital video broadcasting (DVB-T2) systems. These large fluctuations prevent feeding the high power amplifier at an operating point near its non-linear saturation region thereby lowering its power efficiency. In recent years, tone reservation (TR) PAPR reduction techniques have been deeply studied and included in the DVB-T2 and the American digital video broadcasting (ATSC 3.0) specifications. It is based on a gradient iterative approach where, at each iteration, a predefined kernel is used to reduce one peak in time domain. In this paper, a novel TR PAPR reduction technique namely individual carrier allocation for multiple peaks (ICMPs) that is based on a new kernel signal is proposed. This algorithm, compatible with the DVB-T2 standard, offers better performance than the gradient-based DVB-T2 algorithm but suffers with increased complexity for higher modes of DVB-T2 and ATSC 3.0 as the number of required iterations is equal to the number of reserved tones. To overcome this issue, we propose an improved ICMP technique, called grouped ICMP defined with this new kernel. The main principle of this new algorithm consists in dividing the reserved tones into G groups. This highly reduces the number of iterations, now equal to the number of groups, and thereby the latency. An in-depth performance analysis has been done by implementing our algorithm on a testbed platform with real power amplifiers. Both the simulation and experimental results demonstrated that the proposed PAPR reduction algorithm offers very good performance/complexity/latency tradeoff.