A Highly-Efficient Amplification Scheme For Ofdm Signals

The need for higher data rates in wireless communications has resulted in a significant effort in what regards to the design of transmission techniques and waveforms. This design can be very challenging thanks to the strong trade-off between the spectral efficiency and the energy efficiency, which comes from the fact that spectral-efficient waveforms usually presents a very large peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), requiring a linear amplification for preserving the linearity of the transmitted signals. Nevertheless, obtaining spectral- and energy-efficient wireless communications will undoubtedly be one of the main challenges of both 5G and beyond 5G (B5G) systems. In this work, we propose a new amplification scheme named quantized digital amplification (QDA). The QDA is based on the decomposition of a high-PAPR signal into constant-envelope components and allows to obtain very high energy efficiencies, being suitable for spectrally-efficient transmission techniques such as orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). By presenting a set of results of the QDA's prototype, we demonstrate that it is possible to obtain amplification efficiencies way above the ones of the state-of-the art amplification schemes, while preserving the linearity of the transmitted signals.(1)