IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, VOL. 16, NO.

11, NOVEMBER 2009

941

A Low-Complexity PAPR Reduction Scheme

for SFBC MIMO-OFDM Systems
Sen-Hung Wang, Student Member, IEEE, and Chih-Peng Li, Member, IEEE

AbstractThe multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system with
space-frequency block coding (SFBC) is an attractive technique
due to its robustness for time selective fading channels. However,
the SFBC MIMO-OFDM system also inherits from OFDM systems the drawback of high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of
the transmitted signal. The selected mapping (SLM) method is a
major scheme for PAPR reduction. Unfortunately, computational
complexity of the traditional SLM scheme is relatively high since
it requires a number of inverse fast Fourier transforms (IFFTs). In
this letter, a low-complexity PAPR reduction scheme is proposed
for SFBC MIMO-OFDM systems, needing only one IFFT. The
proposed scheme exploits the time-domain signal properties of
SFBC MIMO-OFDM systems to achieve a low-complexity architecture for candidate signal generation.
Index TermsMultiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), peak-to-average
power ratio (PAPR), space-frequency block coding (SFBC).

since it requires an exhaustive search of all possible parameter

combinations to obtain a sequence set with the smallest maximum PAPR.
In this letter, a low-complexity PAPR reduction architecture
is proposed for SFBC MIMO-OFDM systems that employs the
Alamouti scheme. As opposed to conventional schemes that
require at least two IFFTs, the proposed scheme fully exploits
the time-domain signal relationship between the two antennas
and only needs one IFFT. The candidate signal pairs of the two
antennas are generated in the time-domain, rather than the frequency domain, for complexity reduction by using a variety of
time-domain signal properties inherent in SFBC MIMO-OFDM
systems. Extending the proposed scheme to more than two
transmit antennas is possible by applying appropriate time-domain signal properties. However, minor modifications should
be made to the low-complexity architectures that adopt various
encoding matrices.

I. INTRODUCTION

II. SYSTEM MODELS

ECENTLY, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)

orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)
with space-frequency block coding (SFBC) [1] has attracted
increasing attention because it is robust to time selective fading
channels. However, SFBC MIMO-OFDM systems also inherit
disadvantages from OFDM techniques, e.g., sensitivity to
synchronization errors and high peak-to-average power ratio
(PAPR). The literature presents a variety of PAPR reduction
methods for OFDM systems, e.g., selected mapping (SLM)
[2], [3] and partial transmitted sequence (PTS) [4]. In addition, a joint PAPR reduction scheme is proposed in [5] for
MIMO-OFDM systems. Unfortunately, the computational
complexity of these schemes is extremely high. In [6], researchers propose a polyphase interleaving and inversion (PII)
scheme for reducing PAPR in SFBC MIMO-OFDM systems.
Although the PII scheme needs only two inverse fast Fourier
transforms (IFFTs), its computational complexity is also high

Manuscript received March 05, 2009; revised June 11, 2009. First published
July 10, 2009; current version published August 19, 2009. This work was
supported by the National Science Council and the National Science and
Technology Program for Telecommunications of Taiwan under Contracts NSC
97-2219-E-007-007 and NSC 97-2221-E-110-005-MY2. The associate editor
coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was
Dr. Fernando Perez-Gonzalez.
S.-H. Wang is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, National
Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung 804, Taiwan (e-mail: d953010025@student.nsysu.edu.tw).
C.-P. Li is with the Institute of Communications Engineering and the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung
804, Taiwan (e-mail: cpli@faculty.nsysu.edu.tw).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LSP.2009.2027205

This study considers an SFBC MIMO-OFDM system that

adopts the Alamouti scheme [7]. A data symbol vector
is encoded with the Alamouti space-freand
quency encoder into two vectors
(1)
(2)
where is the number of subcarriers and
denotes complex
conjugate operation.
Obtaining an improved approximation of the true PAPR in the
discrete-time case requires the candidate signals to be over-sampled. An over-sampling rate of for the SFBC MIMO-OFDM
zeros in the
system can be achieved by inserting
middle of the encoded symbol vectors. Therefore, the encoded
vectors
vectors can be represented as two

(3)

(4)
Performing
-point IFFT produces the over-sampled timeand , sent simultaneously from andomain signal vectors

1070-9908/$25.00 2009 IEEE

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IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, VOL. 16, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2009

tenna 1 and 2, respectively. As shown in [8],

sufficiently
.
obtains peak information of the continuous-time signals
, is written as
The th element of ,

Performing IFFT to both sides of (12) and (13) one easily obtains the desired results.
Property 2:
and
,
, have the following forms:
(16)
(17)

(5)
where
is the
element of the .
Therefore, in the discrete-time case, the PAPR of the transmitted signals of each antenna is defined as

where
and
are two
vectors and
elements of
and
, respectively.
consist of the first
element of
and
,
Proof: From (8)(11), the
, can be written as
(18)
(19)

(6)
Since the transmitted signals of the two antennas correlate in
SFBC MIMO-OFDM systems, the PAPR should be considered
jointly and the signal pair with the lowest PAPR is selected for
transmission. Therefore, the PAPR of the SFBC MIMO-OFDM
system is defined as
(7)
where

are given by
(20)
(21)

where
denotes the modulo
operation.
Proof: Since the frequency-domain data adopt the Alamouti scheme, we have
(22)
(23)

III. TIME DOMAIN SIGNAL PROPERTIES

FOR SFBC MIMO-OFDM SYSTEMS
This section presents five time-domain signal properties of
SFBC MIMO-OFDM systems. This study utilizes these properties for constructing the proposed PAPR reduction scheme.
Property 1: The IFFT outputs of even and odd subcarriers
are respectively given by
(8)
(9)
where
,
, and
are the time-domain signals of
and
are two
even and odd sub-carriers, respectively, and
circular matrices. The first column of
and
are
respectively given by
(10)
(11)

column of
and , denoted respectively as
and
, are the
cyclic shift of
and
, respectively.
Proof: The even and the odd subcarriers of
can be respectively written as
The

(12)
(13)
where denotes the component-wise multiplication, and
and
are two
vectors

Therefore, (16) and (17) can be easily obtained.

elements of
and
Property 3: The

(14)
(15)

where
and
are the
element of
and
,
Performing IFFT to both
respectively,
sides of (22) and (23) easily obtains the desired results.
Property 4: Cyclic shifts of time-domain signals,
and
, are equivalent to phase rotations of frequency-domain sigand
, respectively. In other words, we have:
nals,

(24)
where
denotes the fast Fourier transform (FFT), is the
number of cyclic shifts, and
is the
element of
or
.
This property is a direct result of FFT and this study omits
the proof .
Property 5: Because of the frequency domain Alamout
(or
) is multiplied by
,
,
coding, if
(or
) should be multiplied by
.
Proving this property is easy using (20) and (21).
IV. THE PROPOSED LOW-COMPLEXITY PAPR REDUCTION
SCHEME FOR SFBC MIMO-OFDM SYSTEMS
The proposed PAPR reduction scheme generates candidate
signal pairs in time-domain and fully utilizes signal correlations
between the two antennas. As a result, the scheme requires only
one IFFT, substantially reducing system complexity.
Fig. 1 depicts the proposed PAPR reduction architecture,
is generated after the
-point
where time-domain signal
and
are obtained by applying
IFFT operation. Then,
Property 1. Only two nonzero elements notably exist in

WANG AND LI: A LOW-COMPLEXITY PAPR REDUCTION SCHEME FOR SFBC MIMO-OFDM SYSTEMS

Fig. 1. Architecture of the proposed PAPR reduction scheme for SFBC MIMOOFDM systems.

and
, and the nonzero elements belong to the set
.
Therefore, both
and
can be easily obtained by complex
additions. Additionally, the proposed architecture only needs
and
since, according to Property 2,
the first halves of
the second halves can be easily obtained from the first halves.
Thus, the computational complexity reduces by half. To further
reduce the computational complexity, Property 3 exploits
the signal relationship between the two antennas, where
obtains from
using (20). Finally,
,
, and
are
fed into the candidate signal generating block (CSGB).
The proposed scheme generates various candidate signal
pairs in time-domain by cyclically shifting time-domain sigand
. According to Property 4, these shifts are
nals,
equivalent to phase rotations of frequency-domain signals
and
. Therefore, the proposed scheme may be regarded as a
modified SLM scheme. It is worth noting that side information
must be transmitted to the receiver to indicate the number of
cyclic shifts that generate the SFBC MIMO-OFDM signal pair
with the lowest PAPR.
cyclic shifts
Fig. 2 delineates details of the CSGB, where
and the resulting signal is denoted as
are performed on
for
. The
candidate
, can be obtained by combining
signal of the first antenna,
with
, i.e., the
element of
has the following form:
(25)
To obtain the
candidate signal of the second antenna,
(21) can be applied to
. The resulting signal is denoted by
and the
element is given by

943

Fig. 2. Structure of the candidate signal generating block (CSGB).

(29)
This process significantly saves computational complexity in
generating a new candidate signal pair. A separate series of simulations (results not shown here) notably found that the values
of have no effect on PAPR reduction performance. Therefore,
as since it does not take
this work selects the rotation factor
extra complex multiplications or additions. After generating
candidate signal pairs, the signal pair with the lowest PAPR is
selected for transmission using (7). It should be noted that, if
candidate signal pairs are generated,
side information bits are needed.
V. ANALYSIS OF COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY
From Property 1 and Property 2, i.e., (8), (9), (16), and (17),
complex additions to generate
and
. Acit takes
complex
cording to Property 2 and Property 3, it takes
multiplications to generate
from
. In the CSGB block,
complex multiplications to obtain
. In adit takes
complex additions for the generdition, there are a total of
,
,
, and
. Furthermore, an
ation of
IFFT operation requires
complex multiplicacomplex additions.
tions and
Table I illustrates the total computational complexity for both
the proposed scheme and the traditional SLM scheme. Fig. 3
depicts numerical results for the case of
. From
inspection, the proposed scheme has a substantially lower computational complexity than the traditional SLM scheme. In particular, the number of complex multiplications and additions required in the proposed scheme is only 4.22% and 11.72%, re.
spectively, to that required in the SLM scheme for

(26)
Property 2 can be adopted again to reduce the computational
. The
candidate signal
complexity in generating
, is then obtained by combining
of the second antenna,
with
, i.e., the
element can be expressed as
(27)
Finally, Property 5 can be applied to
and
to
) candidate signal pair, i.e., the
obtain another (the
elements of
and
have the following
forms:
(28)

VI. SIMULATION RESULTS

This research performs a series of simulations to evaluate
PAPR reduction performance of the proposed scheme. The
simulations assume the data were 16-QAM modulated and the
sub-carriers. To approximate the
system contained
true PAPR, this study over-samples the SFBC MIMO-OFDM
. The random phase rotation vectors
signal by a factor of
employed in the SLM scheme are randomly generated from the
.
set
The traditional SLM scheme has the best PAPR performance
since its phase rotation vectors are truly random. By contrast,
phase rotations in the proposed scheme only perform on odd
sub-carriers of antenna 1 and even sub-carriers of antenna 2,

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IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, VOL. 16, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2009

M LN

Fig. 3. Number of complex operations as a function of the number of candidate

(
= 1024).
signals

TABLE I
COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY OF VARIOUS PAPR REDUCTION
SCHEMES FOR SFBC MIMO-OFDM SYSTEMS

thus limiting the randomness of phase rotation vectors. Consequently, an inevitable degradation of the PAPR performance occurs.
Fig. 4 compares PAPR performance of the proposed scheme
with that of the conventional SLM scheme. The proposed
between 0 and
scheme randomly selects the cyclic shift
. A separate series of simulations (results not shown
do not affect PAPR reduction
here) find that the values of
performance. Simulation results show that the performance loss
of the proposed scheme relative to that of the SLM scheme is
and
. Although
0.8 dB for
PAPR reduction performance of the proposed scheme is slightly
worse than that of the SLM scheme, the proposed scheme has
much lower computational complexity. Findings show that
the proposed scheme improves the PAPR by around 2.6 dB
compared to the original SFBC MIMO-OFDM signal pair for
the same conditions.
VII. CONCLUSION
This study presents a novel PAPR reduction scheme for
SFBC MIMO-OFDM systems, where five time-domain signal
properties are exploited to construct a low-complexity architecture. Compared to the conventional PAPR reduction schemes
for SFBC MIMO-OFDM systems, where at least two IFFTs

Fig. 4. Comparisons of PAPR reduction performance for various schemes

( = 256, = 4).

are required, the proposed scheme only needs one IFFT since
it fully utilizes time-domain signal relationships between the
two antennas.
Simulation results show that PAPR performance of the proposed scheme is marginally poorer than that of the SLM scheme.
However, the proposed scheme has substantially lower computational complexity. The proposed scheme has a maximum performance loss of no more than 0.8 dB compared to that of the
and
SLM scheme for the case of
. The number of complex multiplications and additions the
proposed scheme requires under the same conditions is only
4.22% and 11.72%, respectively, compared to that required in
the SLM scheme.
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