(IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, 43

Vol. 2, No. 10, 2010

Active Constellation Extension combined with

Particle Swarm Optimization for PAPR Reduction
in OFDM Signals
A. Ouqour1, Y. Jabrane2, B. Ait Es Said3, A. Ait Ouahman4
1,3
Cadi Ayyad University, Faculty of Sciences Semlalia, Department of physics, Avenue
Prince My Abdellah, P.O. Box 2390, 40001, Marrakech, Morocco
a.ouqour@ucam.ac.ma , aitessaid@ucam.ac.ma

2,4
Cadi Ayyad University, National School of Applied Sciences, Avenue Abdelkarim
Khattabi, P.O. Box 575, 40001, Marrakech, Morocco
y.jabrane@ensa.ac.ma , ouahman@ucam.ac.ma

Abstract: Active Constellation Extension - Approximate 2. System Model

Gradient Project (ACE-AGP) algorithm is an interesting method In a multi-carrier system, the time-domain complex base-
for reducing the envelope fluctuations in multi-carrier signals,
band transmitted signal for the ℓ-th symbol can be
but it occurs a very high computational complexity and thus a
written as:
large convergence time. In this paper, Particle Swarm
optimization (PSO) is introduced to fight this complexity, by
searching and reducing the Peak to Average Power Ratio
(PAPR) with respect to ACE-AGP. Simulation results show that
the proposed method solves the PAPR problem with a very low where N is the number of sub-carriers and is the
complexity and better performance. frequency-domain complex base-band symbol modulated on
the k-th sub-carrier at OFDM symbol . The classical metric
Keywords: OFDM, PAPR, PSO, ACE-AGP. to evaluate the peak power is the PAPR, defined as:

1. Introduction
When Multi-carrier modulations such as Orthogonal
Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has been where denotes the expectation, and and
advocated for Long Term Evolution (LTE) of wireless represent the -norm and the 2-norm of , respectively.
personal communications [1]. However, it undergoes large
envelope fluctuations, causing a loss in energy efficiency 3. ACE method
due to the need of power back-off at the High Power
Amplifiers (HPA). Several proposals in the literature try to The ACE method modifies and expands the constellation
reduce their envelope fluctuations to fight this problem points within an allowable region which does not affect the
which is the most important drawbacks in multi-carrier demodulation slicer, and thus, it does not need side
modulations [2] - [8]. information to be sent. By using this new degree of freedom,
Active Constellation Extension (ACE) [9] is an interesting multi-carrier signals with arbitrarily low envelope
technique since it is able to achieve large reductions, it does fluctuations can be obtained. In [9], different algorithms to
not need side information and it only needs a small increase achieve PAPR reduction are provided. In this paper, the
in transmits power. However, ACE requires much iteration Approximate Gradient-Project (AGP) algorithm will be
for convergence and this, unfortunately, constitutes its main used.
weakness [10]. In this paper, ACE will be used combined Let's be the frequency-domain version from , i.e,
with PSO, with the aim of drastically reducing its its FFT, and Q the clipping amplitude value. The algorithm
implementation complexity. proceeds as follows:
To that end, we will use Particle Swarm Optimization
• Initialization: i accounts for the
(PSO), a well-known tool (heuristic) to solve the complexity
iteration index.
problems [11] - [14]. The balance of this paper is organized
as follows. Section 2 introduces the system model. Section 3 • Clip any , Q and form
describes the ACE method. In Section 4, the proposed PSO-
ACE-AGP architecture to reduce the envelope fluctuations
is described and analyzed. Then, the obtained results are
presented and discussed in Section 5. Finally, conclusions where .
are drawn in Section 6. • Compute the clipped signal:
44 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security,
Vol. 2, No. 10, 2010

In this work, during the PSO process, each potential

• Calculate the FFT of to obtain .
solution is represented as a particle with a position vector
• Maintain the values of when they are valid , referred to as clipped-off portion and a moving
point extensions on the constellation and set to 0 velocity represented as and , respectively.
when not. Apply an IFFT to obtain c.

Original
Modifed ACE-AGP
• Determine the step size according to some
criterion and compute new version of the time- Modifed ACE-AGP
domain signal .
Modifed ACE-AGP
• Calculate the for the new signal. If

OFDM
acceptable, stop the algorithm and return as
output, otherwise, increase i and go to step 2.Iterate
until target is accomplished or a maximum number
of iterations is reached.

signals
Modifed ACE-AGP
4. Particle Swarm Optimization
Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a population based
stochastic optimization technique, system is initialized with PSO
a population of random solutions and searches for optima by
updating generations. However, PSO has no evolution
operators such as crossover and mutation. In PSO, the
OFDM signals with reduced PAPR
potential solutions, called particles, fly through the problem
space by following the current optimum particles with
PSO ACE-AGP implementation
respect to a specific algorithm. In a previous work [15] a
suboptimal partial transmit sequence (PTS) based on Thus for a K-dimensional optimization, the position and
particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm has been velocity of the ith particle can be represented as:
presented for the low computation complexity and the
reduction of the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of an (4)
orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) respectively. Each particle has its own best position:
system. The procedure of standard PSO can be summarized
as follows:
corresponding to the individual best objective value obtained
Generate initial population so far at time t, referred to as pbest. The global best (gbest)
random particle is denoted by:

which represents the best particle found so far at time t in

Evaluate fitness for each particle and store the entire swarm. The new velocity (t+1) for particle i is
Start and
the global define solution
person bestspace
positions updated by:

where is the old velocity of the particle i at time t.

Check stop Apparent from this equation, the new velocity is related to
Decision taken the old velocity weighted by weight w and also associated to
criteria
the position of the particle itself and that of the global best
one by acceleration factors c1 and c2. The c1 and c2 are
End therefore referred to as the cognitive and social rates,
respectively, because they represent the weighting of the
acceleration terms that pull the individual particle toward
Update the personal and global best
position according to the fitness value the personal best and global best positions. The inertia
weight w in eq (7) is employed to manipulate the impact of
the previous history of velocities on the current velocity.
Update each particle Generally, in population-based optimization methods, it is
velocity and position desirable to encourage the individuals to wander through the
entire search space, without clustering around the local
optima, during the early stage of the optimization.
Adjust inertial weight
A suitable value for w(t) provides the desired balance
monotonically decreasing function
between the global and local exploration ability of the
swarm and, consequently, improves the effectiveness of the
G =G +1 algorithm. Experimental results suggest that it's preferable
to initialize the inertia weight to a large value, giving
PSO algorithm
 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, 45
Vol. 2, No. 10, 2010

priority to global exploration of the search space, linear

decreasing w(t) so as to obtain refined solutions [13], [14].
For the purpose of intending to simulate the slight
unpredictable component of natural swarm behaviour, two
random functions r1 and r2 are applied to independently
provide uniform distributed numbers in the range [0, 1] to
stochastically vary the relative pull of the personal and
global best particles. Based on the updated velocities, new
position for particle i is computed according the following
equation:

The populations of particles are then moved according to the

new velocities and locations calculated by (11) and (12), and
tend to cluster together from different directions. Thus, the
evaluation of each associate fitness of the new population of
particles begins again. The algorithm runs through these
processes iteratively until it stops. In this paper, the current
position can be modified by [16]: (a) N=256

where is the initial weight, is the final weight,

is maximum number of iterations, and is the
current iteration number.

5. Results
Monte Carlo simulations have been carried out with 10000
randomly generated QPSK-modulated OFDM symbols for
N=256, N=512 and N=1024. In figure 1, we can observe
that the proposed method outperform the one based on
ACE-AGP since the PAPR reduction of PSO-ACE-AGP
when Gn = 40 is about respectively 7dB, 5.9dB and 4.9dB
for N=256, 512 and N=1024, comparing to 7.3dB, 6.8dB
and 5.9dB for N=256, N=512 and N=1024 when using
ACE-AGP (the convergence of ACE-AGP is slower).
It is worth noting that these results are achieved with very
low complexity and with only one iteration ( ) by
choosing different number of generations (Gn = 10; 20; 30; (b) N=512
40) (2000 iterations for ACE-AGP).
The complexity of the algorithm, in terms of complex
multiplications and additions per OFDM symbol, is
and ,
respectively, where is the number of iterations, which
is usually high.
Besides, on each iteration, the needs to be evaluated
to determine if the target goal has been reached. These
operations are also required in many other methods.
Besides,
a DFT/IDFT are needed per iteration. A complexity
summary and comparison has been detailed in table 1.

(c) N=1024
Figure 1. Comparison of PAPR reduction between
ACE-AGP and PSO-ACE-AGP using QPSK
46 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security,
Vol. 2, No. 10, 2010

Table 1: Computation complexity [23] M. Ohta, Y. Ueda, and K. Tamashita, “PAPR

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Optimal
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Vol. 2, No. 10, 2010

Author’s Profile

Ahmed Ouqour received engineering

degrees of state in telecommunications in
1998 from the Air Force Academy of
Marrakesh, Morocco. He also obtained
engineering degrees of state in computer
and networks in 2005 from the National
School of Mineral Industry Rabat,
Morocco. He is now with the Team of
Telecommunications and Computer
Networks of the University Cadi Ayyad of
Marrakech, Morocco preparing his PhD.

Younes Jabrane received his PhD in

telecommunications and informatics from
Cadi Ayyad University of Marrakech,
Morocco. He is now Assistant Professor in
National School of Applied Sciences of
Marrakech. He did several stay researches in
Department of signal theory and
communications of Carlos III of Madrid,
Spain, his researches are on CDMA and
OFDM.
Brahim Ait Es Said is a Professor in
Faculty of Sciences Semlalia of Marrakech,
he is a supervisor of several students PhD,
also he did many stay researches in
University of Valenciennes, France. His
researches are on Channel equalization,
image processing and OFDM.

Abdellah Ait Ouahman is a Professor

Director of National School of Applied
Sciences of Marrakech. He supervises
several students’ PhD, he is the coordinator
of several projects and he is also the local
chair of IEEE conferences organized in
Marrakech for many times. His researches
are on logistic, telecommunications and
informatics networks.