Turbo Decision Aided Receivers for Clipping Noise Mitigation in Coded OFDM

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is the modulation technique used in most of the high-rate communication standards. However, OFDM signals exhibit high peak average to power ratio (PAPR) that makes them particularly sensitive to nonlinear distortions caused by high-power amplifiers. Hence, the amplifier needs to operate at large output backoff, thereby decreasing the average efficiency of the transmitter. One way to reduce PAPR consists in clipping the amplitude of the OFDM signal introducing an additional noise that degrades the overall system performance. In that case, the receiver needs to set up an algorithm that compensates this clipping noise. In this paper, we propose three new iterative receivers with growing complexity and performance that operate at severe clipping: the first and simplest receiver uses a Viterbi algorithm as channel decoder whereas the other two implement a soft-input soft-output (SISO) decoder. Each soft receiver is analyzed through EXIT charts for different mappings. Finally, the performances of the receivers are simulated on both short time-varying channel and AWGN channel.