Energy efficiency comparison of Outphasing and IDP techniques with non-linear power amplifiers

OFDM is a prominent multicarrier modulation (MCM) waveforms for wireless systems. It has a very high Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR) due to the very great dynamic of the time domain signal. At high energy efficient level, the high PAPR is major concern, especially when non-linear power amplifiers (PA) are used. PA linearization together with PAPR reduction techniques are two classical techniques for improving energy efficiency and BER performance. In this paper, two low PAPR techniques with similar transmitter architecture will be compared, in terms of energy efficiency and BER performance: Outphasing method which generates two emitted signals with constant envelope and iterative dichotomy PAPR reduction (IDP) method which creates two emitted signals with low PAPR. In the two cases, the two generated signals are non-linearly amplified and further combined before the antenna device. Simulation results show that the IDP technique outperforms Outphasing technique in terms of BER and emitted power.