PAPR Reduction for Carrier Aggregated OFDM Signals based on a Low Complexity Sequence Alignment Scheme

Carrier Aggregation (CA) has been evolving with all releases of LTE due to its large benefits. However, LTE is based on OFDM which suffers from its high Peak-to-Average-Power-Ratio (PAPR), therefore inducing non-linearities and causing deterioration in the power efficiency of the High Power Amplifier (HPA). Although the PAPR problem has been extensively tackled, there remains a need for techniques that can cope with current system designs. We therefore propose in this paper a new distortion-less PAPR reduction method that is characterized by its high performance and significantly lower complexity when compared to existing methods. We refer to this technique as the Peak Valley Alignment (PVA) method. It is inspired from the sequence alignment techniques used in bioinformatics. We show that the performance attained by optimization-based methods can be approximately achieved through the use of heuristics at a much lower complexity.