On the Properties of Cubic Metric for OFDM Signals

Abstract: As a metric for amplitude fluctuation of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal, cubic metric (CM) has received an increasing attention because it is more closely related to the distortion induced by nonlinear devices than the well-known peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). In this paper, the properties of CM of OFDM signal is investigated. First, asymptotic distribution of CM is derived. Second, it is verified that 1.7 times oversampling rate is good enough to capture the CM of continuous OFDM signals in terms of mean square error, which is also practically meaningful because the fast Fourier transform size is typically 1.7 times larger than the nominal bandwidth in the long-term evolution (LTE) of cellular communication systems.