Joint time-frequency alignment for PAPR and OOBE suppression of OFDM-based waveforms

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) waveform has been adopted by many wireless standards due to its numerous advantages. However, OFDM symbols have two critical drawbacks: high out-of-band emission (OOBE) and high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). Cyclic prefix (CP) alignment is one of the promising methods that jointly suppresses the OOBE and PAPR of OFDM symbols without introducing extra receiver complexity. However, its suppression performance remains limited in practical scenarios as it only exploits the degrees of freedom (DoFs) provided by the CP part of the OFDM symbols. In this letter, we propose a novel approach which jointly exploits the time domain resources, i.e., CP, and the frequency domain resources that are not effectively used by the receiver, i.e., guard tones and the subcarriers faded by the multipath channel. Thus, the available DoFs are substantially increased and more efficiently utilized for alignment purpose. It is shown that the OOBE and PAPR suppression performance is significantly enhanced with the proposed method as compared with the original approach.