Assessment of the peak-to-average power ratio in different channel organization strategies

The benefits of organizing multichannel communications by fragmenting the data in bonded or in aggregated channels have been usually assessed at the media access control layer, being the network traffic the purpose of the studies. Despite the importance of the different kinds of channel organizations over the transmit signal peak-to average power ratio (PAPR) to size the back-off value of the power amplifier, little attention has been paid to it. In this paper the key aspect is the PAPR, which is fundamental to face transmitter designs optimizing the trade-off between linearity and the time-of-life of the batteries. The results are of interest not only in ad hoc cognitive radio networks, but also in some of the latest European Telecommunications Standards Institute and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers standards supporting mobility in either wireless local area network environments or in cellular communications. A standardized radio link is used to model a realistic scenario to study different settings of the aggregate channels and to compare them with channel bonding alternatives. Besides, the suitability of some crest factor reduction techniques is here considered for different channel organizations. The results show how the channel organization (contiguous, regular and random spaced), either with bonded or aggregated strategies, affects the PAPR.