The PAPR Problem

Ive happened to stumble over PAPR (Peak to Average Power Ratio) quite a lot lately as it seems to play a big role in WiMAX and 3GPP LTE mobile devices. Most papers mention that LTE has a better PAPR than WiMAX but fail to explain what it is and why this is so important. After some research and help from a number of experts heres an intro to PAPR: When transmitting data from the mobile terminal to the network, a power amplifier is required to boost the outgoing signal to a level high enough to be picked up by the network. The power amplifier is one of the biggest consumers of energy in a device and should thus be as power efficient as possible to increase the operation time of the device on a battery charge. The efficiency of a power amplifier depends on two factors:

The amplifier must be able to amplify the highest peak value of the wave. Due to silicon constraints, the peak value decides over the power consumption of the amplifier. The peaks of the wave however do not transport any more information than the average power of the signal over time. The transmission speed therefore doesnt depend on the peak power output required for the peak values of the wave but rather on the average power level.

As both power consumption and transmission speed are of importance for designers of mobile devices the power amplifier should consume as little energy as possible. Thus, the lower the difference between the peak power to the average power (PAPR) the longer is the operating time of a mobile device at a certain transmission speed compared to devices that use a modulation schemes with a higher PAPR. Now lets come back to the beginning of this blog entry in which I said that papers generally say that LTE has a better PAPR than WiMAX. This is because of different modulation schemes used in the uplink. While WiMAX uses OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) which is fast but has a high PAPR, LTE designers choose to use SC-FDMA (Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access) which is as fast but is said to have a better PAPR. So whats OFDMA and SC-FDMA? Well, thats for another blog entry.
Uplink power efficiency OFDM versus SC-FDMA Both WiMAX and LTE use OFDMA for the downlink and so have broadly similar performance, for any given RF bandwidth and set of conditions. By contrast, the modulation techniques for their uplinks are entirely different. WiMAX (including Mobile WiMAX) also use OFDM for uplink, while LTE uses a new technique SC-FDMA (Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access). Hyung G. Myung's site [hgmyung.googlepages.com/scfdma] provides a detailed description of SC-FDMA.

SC-FDMA resembles OFDM in many respects, but involves using a Fourier transform to convert OFDM's separate sub-carriers on separate frequencies into a different, time-domain, form. With OFDMA, several handsets can transmit upstream at the same time, within the same set of 512 subcarriers, with each handset transmitting data on different sub-carriers. This reduces the frequency diversity of each handset's signal, but enables several of them to transmit upstream at the same time. SC-FDMA also enables simultaneous upstream transmissions, and the receiver is able to separate the separate components from each handset after suitable mathematical transformation. SC-FDMA, as it is planned to be implemented in LTE, results in a transmission properties with some of the characteristics of both OFDM and DS-CDMA (Direct Sequence Code Division Multiple Access). These are two completely different modulation techniques, and SC-FDMA can be considered as a novel, but useful hybrid of the two. Both SC-FDMA and OFDM can be used with fast-moving mobile devices, with some compromises in the total achievable data rate. Part of the problem in accommodating fast-moving devices is the Doppler shift resulting from the movement, including from the mobile device's point of view. Another is coping with the rapid changes in propagation environment, such as those due to multipath reflections. SC-FDMA can also be used with MIMO, as it will be in LTE. As we discuss below, SC-FDMA will also be the uplink modulation scheme of the future WiMAX 802.16m system. Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR) The primary attraction of SC-FDMA over OFDMA is the former's significantly reduced Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR). ODMA's output waveform is the sum of hundreds of sub-carriers, each of which is composed of uncorrelated levels of sine and cosine signal. The result of summing a large number of small uncorrelated (essentially random, with respect to each other) numbers is that most of the time, the sum is relatively small too. However, occasionally, when many of the subcarriers are strongly positive, or strongly negative, the sum is a much larger value than usual. If these values were numbers in a digital computer system, this would present no problems. However the digital OFDMA signal is converted to an analogue signal by a Digital to Analogue Converter (DAC), and amplified to drive the transmit antenna. The signal propagates through space, being very strongly attenuated and mixed with interference and other noise, where it arrives at the receive antenna. There, it is amplified again and then fed to a high resolution, high speed, Analogue

to Digital Converter (ADC). Now in a digital form, the receive signal is analysed by a Fourier Transform operation and many other processes to recover the transmitted data. Because OFDM signals have a high PAPR, the linear amplifiers which must be used to drive the transmit antenna, and in the receiver, must have a large headroom compared to the average value of the signal they are handling. It is possible to set the amplifier's power supply so that the very highest peaks, which are quite infrequent, will be clipped but the more clipping which occurs, the greater the distortion, which adds noise to the received signal and makes it harder to discern the finer increments of modulation: four or more levels of sine and cosine in each sub-carrier. Signals with a high PAPR are most problematic in battery operated transmitters. The RF amplifier must have a relatively high positive and negative power supply in order that its transistors can lift and drop the output waveform linearly to follow the extreme, but relatively infrequent, peaks of the OFDM signal. While the average current used by the amplifier may be quite low, and its average output level also quite low, all this current is drawn from these high voltage supplies. For a signal with a low PAPR, the same average signal level can be achieved with an amplifier with much lower power supply voltages, because the signal does not have high peaks. Consequently, to achieve a given average power output, an amplifier with +/- 12 volt supplies might be required for an OFDM signal (allowing for some low, but acceptable, level of noise due to the very highest peaks being clipped) or with the same amplifier with +/- 4 volt supplies for an SC-FDMA signal with a much lower PAPR. Since the average current drawn by both amplifiers is the same, and the power drawn is the current multiplied by the power supply voltages of the amplifier, in this example, the SC-FDMA transmitter only uses a third of the power of the OFDMA transmitter. Inefficiency in transmitter amplifiers presents few problems in base-stations, but is a major determinant of battery life in a cellphone or other mobile device. Consequently, considering all the tradeoffs, for LTE it was decided that SC-FDMA was a better choice for the uplink modulation technique. This is likely to result in LTE being more suitable for handheld devices then WiMAX. This advantage of lower power consumption would not be so important in a device with a bigger battery, such as a laptop and of course it is no advantage for a mains-powered fixed WiMAX service.

WiMAX chipset power consumption test In late 2008, two mobile WiMAX chipsets were carefully tested for power consumption for both voice and data patterns of usage, connected into a test jig which simulated a wireless connection to a base station [See http://www.wimaxtrends.com/2008/10/low-power-wimax-chipsets-accel.html]. All major chipset vendors were invited, but only two took up the offer. The GDM7205 chipset of GCT Semiconductor compared somewhat favourably with the consumption of chipsets in current mass-production EV-DO and HSDPA 3G handsets, including a Palm Treo, an Apple 3G iPhone and a RIM Blackberry. The ALT2150 chipset from Altair Semiconductor performed markedly better.