A comprehensive analysis of the clipping effects on signals with different statistical patterns

This paper presents a detailed study on the impact of two different types of clipping, soft- and hard-clipping, effects on several signals that present different probability density functions (PDFs), and thus, different peak-to-average power ratios. A mathematical approximation to calculate the integrated output power based on the input signal PDFs will be shown. Afterwards, the clipping effects will be evaluated in terms of fundamental signal compression, adjacent channel power leakage, and in-band signal-to-noise ratio, which are very important figures of merit regarding the actual communications systems.