Low PAPR Design for OFDM Symbols with Guard Bands and Baseband Filtering

Abstract

We address the problem of power amplifier (PA) non-linearity in OFDM radars. The usual metric to minimize the impact of PA non-linearities is the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). However, minimizing the PAPR without considering the effect of guard bands and analog lowpass filtering results in severe underestimation of the actual PAPR in continuous time. We propose an algorithm that takes guard bands and analog filtering into account in the PAPR minimization. Simulation is used to show that linear PAPR smaller than 1.3 (1.14dB) is achieved with our algorithm and that the peak sidelobe level in the range profile are reduced well below -50dB.