A Novel PTS Technique with Side Information Blind Detector Based on Minimized Error Accumulation for PAPR Reduction in Coded Underwater Acoustic OFDM Systems

In this paper, a partial transmit sequence (PTS) technique with a side information (SI) blind detector based on minimized error accumulation for PAPR reduction in the coded underwater acoustic (UWA) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communication system is proposed. Due to the complexity of UWA channels, channel coding is inevitably employed to ensure accurate information transmission. However, the error correction capability of channel coding usually has a certain margin; the decoder will fail to provide the expected coding gain for the system when the number of error bits exceeds the error correction capability. Therefore, by utilizing the accumulation impact of bit errors inherent in channel coding, it can be regarded as an indicator vector for the SI blind detector, enabling autonomous identification of the weighted phase factor vector sequence index without prior information. Thus, there is no need to reserve the SI transmission symbols, as required by the conventional PTS (C-PTS) scheme, effectively reducing the probability of large-scale bit error caused by the wrong SI. The experimental results show that the BER performance of the system has seen an improvement of about one order of magnitude compared to C-PTS. Consequently, the proposed technique enhances system bandwidth utilization and communication efficiency, ensuring the real-time performance of the underwater acoustic communication (UAC) OFDM system.