Stochastic Resonance-Based Power Amplifier Design for Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing Signals

A stochastic resonance-based power amplifier (PA) is proposed for linearly and efficiently amplifying signals with large envelope fluctuations such as those transmitted in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The proposed architecture uses a Collins summing network in conjunction with a bandpass filter. The performance of the proposed PA is evaluated through the amplification of OFDM signals in terms of bit-error rate characteristics for both uncoded and coded message symbols. It is demonstrated that the performance improves as the number of parallel paths in the summing network increases, with a significant performance gain being obtained even for a moderate number of parallel paths.