A novel approach to control the envelope variations of a multicarrier radar signal using companding and peak clipping technique

This paper aims to reduce the Peak-to-Mean Envelope Power Ratio (PMEPR) of a Multicarrier Complementary Phase Coded (MCPC) signal. A MCPC signal consists of N subcarriers which are phase modulated by N distinct phase sequences. Each of these N subcarriers are spaced 1/tb apart from each other, where t
_b
is the duration of each phase element, constituting an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) signal. A signal distortion technique, companding, is used to reduce the PMEPR of the generated MCPC signal. Further the use of peak clipping technique on the MCPC signal after the application of the companding technique reduces the abrupt variations in the MCPC signal. A comparison of the autocorrelations and ambiguity functions of the MCPC signal obtained by the above mentioned methods is performed to determine the most suitable approach required for radar applications.