A Low-BER Clipping Scheme for PAPR Reduction in STBC MIMO-OFDM Systems

Clipping is a simple scheme to reduce the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Further, it can be extended to space-time block coding (STBC) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) OFDM systems for the PAPR reduction. In the conventional clipping schemes for STBC MIMO-OFDM systems, the input symbols are first encoded and then clipped. In this paper, a new scheme is proposed, where the clipping operation is performed before space-time block coding. We theoretically prove that the proposed scheme has better bit-error rate (BER) performance while maintaining the same PAPR reduction as the conventional schemes. Additionally, we derive the symbol-error rate (SER) and BER expressions for the new scheme over multipath fading channels. The simulation results show a good match with our analysis.