PAPR analysis and mitigation algorithms for beamforming MIMO OFDM systems

Beamforming (or precoding) techniques have been widely adopted in modern MIMO OFDM systems. Using beamforming can significantly improve the receive SNR of OFDM systems. However, the combination of transmit signals after beamforming deteriorates the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), which has long been considered a major issue of OFDM systems. High PAPR not only complicates the design of the power amplifier, but also increases power consumption. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the PAPR performance of MIMO OFDM systems that adopt either one of the two popular beamforming schemes, i.e. MRT (maximum ratio transmission) and EGT (equal gain transmission). The analysis considers different numbers of channel taps after sampling. The results may provide important reference for practical designs when evaluating the required power amplifiers and power consumption. Moreover, the theoretical results show that MRT OFDM systems generally perform much worse than EGT OFDM systems in terms of PAPR. Furthermore, motivated from the derived results, PAPR reduction algorithms are proposed for both MRT OFDM and EGT OFDM systems. It is worth to mention that for MRT OFDM systems, the proposed algorithm can improve both PAPR and bit error rate; for EGT OFDM systems, the proposed algorithm improves PAPR while it only slightly degrades bit error rate.