A Hybrid PAPR Reduction Scheme in OFDM-IM Using Phase Rotation Factors and Dither Signals on Partial Sub-Carriers

As a multi-carrier modulation technique, a high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) is a common issue suffered by orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with index modulation (OFDM-IM) due to its system structure. High PAPR may cause signal distortion, which affects correct symbol transmission. This paper tries to inject dither signals to the inactive (idle) sub-carriers, which is a unique transmission structure of OFDM-IM, to reduce PAPR. Unlike the previous works, which utilize all idle sub-carriers, the proposed PAPR reduction scheme utilizes selected partial sub-carriers. This method performs well in terms of bit error rate (BER) performance and energy efficiency, which are obvious drawbacks of the previous PAPR reduction works due to the introduction of dither signals. In addition, in this paper, phase rotation factors are combined with the dither signals to compensate for the PAPR reduction performance degradation due to the insufficient use of partial idle sub-carriers. Moreover, an energy detection scheme is designed and proposed in this paper in order to distinguish the index of phase rotation factor used for transmission. It is shown by extensive simulation results that the proposed hybrid PAPR reduction scheme is able to implement an impressive PAPR reduction performance among existing dither signa-based schemes as well as classical distortion-less PAPR reduction schemes. In addition, the proposed method obtains better error performance and energy efficiency than that of the previous works. At the error probability 10-4, the proposed method can achieve around 5 dB gain compared to the conventional dither signal-based schemes.