Belief Propagation Receivers for Near-Optimal Detection of Nonlinearly Distorted OFDM Signals

It is generally assumed that nonlinear distortion effects in multicarrier systems can lead to substantial performance degradation. However, it was recently shown that the nonlinear distortion component contains information on the transmitted signal and can be used to improve the performance. Nonetheless, all known receivers that are able to take advantage of this fact are extremely complex. In this paper, we present receivers based on the generalized approximate message passing concept for orthogonal transform multiplexing (OFDM) signals with strong nonlinear effects. Our simulation results show that the proposed receivers are very powerful, allowing excellent performance in the presence of strong nonlinear distortions. In fact, nonlinear OFDM schemes using those receivers can outperform linear OFDM schemes by several dBs in ideal additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels, and by tens of dBs in frequency-selective fading channels.