Mitigation of PA Nonlinearity for IEEE 802.11ah Power-Efficient Uplink via Iterative Subcarrier Regularization

An orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmitter for 802.11ah uplink may consume unnecessarily high power due to the malicious effect of a large peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). This is particularly a problem for client devices (CDs) under the low-power wide-area (LPWA) technology in an Internet of thing (IoT) system, where high PAPR signals may drive the power amplifier (PA) to operate with large input back-off (IBO). This article focuses on receiver-side signal compensation (SC) techniques and introduces a novel scheme called iterative subcarrier regularization (ISR), which is based on the generalization of Papoulis-Gerchberg algorithm (GPGA). We claim that the proposed scheme is completely compatible with 802.11ah as it only exploits the prior information available in the standard operations and popular system-build-in functions in the iterative signal reconstruction process. Extensive numerical evaluations demonstrate that the proposed scheme can improve PA efficiency by 4-9 dB for uplink signaling.