Novel Tone Reservation Method for DFT-s-OFDM

In this paper, a novel guard-tone reservation (GTR) method is proposed to reduce the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of discrete Fourier transform-spread-orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (DFT-s-OFDM) waveform. Unlike existing PAPR reduction methods, the proposed GTR operates directly in the data symbol domain, estimating the peaks through the relations between the data symbols, while the corresponding peak-cancellation signal (PCS) is efficiently embedded into the waveform processing. Furthermore, the PCS is generated by exploiting only the guard-band tones, leaving thus the inband data tones undistorted. The performance of the method is evaluated in 5G New Radio (NR) uplink context including also realistic measured power amplifier (PA) characteristics. The obtained results show that significant PAPR reduction and corresponding PA output power gains can be obtained while the computational complexity is shown to be low.