This paper considers the use of the linear amplification with nonlinear components (LINC) technique for the power amplification of spectrally compact offset quadrature phase shift keying (OQPSK) signals allowing the use of highly efficient, low cost, and strongly nonlinear high power amplifiers (HPAs). However, the performance of the LINC signal separation and power combining procedures decreases with the rise of the signal's peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). A new ring-type magnitude modulation (RMM) method is proposed for OQPSK signals that limits both its maximum and minimum complex envelope excursions avoiding zero crossings, without spreading the transmitted signal's spectrum. The performance results show that band-limited OQPSK signals whose envelope has low fluctuations produce LINC components with a narrower spectrum, with a considerable impact on the LINC transmitter regardless of the type of combiner chosen: when using a passive/matched combiner, the transmitter's power efficiency is significantly increased without spreading the combined signal's spectrum; for the highly efficient non-linear Chireix combiner, there is a reduction of the amount of spectral leakage produced by nonlinearly combining the LINC signal components. Finally, an iterative decoding scheme is also proposed, which employs estimates of the received symbols' RMM coefficients to compensate the RMM distortion.

The expectations for fifth generation (5G) systems involve handling huge throughputs together with power consumption. In order to address this issue, massive multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) schemes were developed exploring the fact that any M-ary constellation can be decomposed as several offset quadrature phase shift keying (OQPSK) signals, to be amplified by efficient saturated amplifiers and transmitted separately. Since nonlinear amplifiers should be employed with constant envelope signals to avoid nonlinear distortion, a ring-type magnitude modulation (RMM) technique was proposed for bandlimited OQPSK signals to mitigate its envelope fluctuations while maintaining its spectral characteristics. This technique was shown to improve the power amplification efficiency of linear amplification with nonlinear components (LINC) transmitters, although with some degradation of the of the detection performance. This paper proposes an iterative decoding scheme relying on the accuracy of the first iteration's log likelihood ratio (LLR) computation to estimate the RMM coefficients of the received symbols. Several LLR computation methods are compared with the ideal case where the receiver knows each symbol's RMM coefficients, and it is shown that a few iterations are enough to obtain a bit error rate (BER) performance close to the best case scenario.

Strongly nonlinear amplifiers have lower implementation complexity, together with much higher amplification efficiency than linear amplifiers. However, they are only recommendable when the signals at their input have very low envelope fluctuations, something that in general is incompatible with signals with high spectral efficiency (i.e. employing high-order constellations). It is proved, although, that spectral efficient M-ary constellations can be decomposed as a sum of several OQPSK signals that can be amplified separately, thus bringing a new life for this modulation scheme. Constant- envelope OQPSK-type signals can be obtained using its equivalent minimum shift keying (MSK) representation, but don't possess the required compact spectrum close to the minimum Nyquist frequency. This can only be achieved by employing narrowband Nyquist filters, which on the other hand causes the signal's envelope to fluctuate. Considering that, this paper proposes a ring-type magnitude modula- tion (RMM) method for narrowband offset quadrature phase shift keying (OQPSK) signals that considerably reduces its envelope fluctuations with- out spreading the transmitted signal's spectrum. Simulation results show that the reduction of the signal's dynamic range and peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) allows the use of highly efficient, nonlinear saturated high power amplifiers (HPAs) without spreading the signal's spectrum and with minimum bit error rate (BER) performance degradation.

The linear amplification with nonlinear components (LINC) amplification concept is very important on the developing of the modern mobile and satellite communications systems due to the use of inexpensive high power amplifiers (HPA). This paper analyses the effectiveness of combining an efficient PAPR reducing technique based on magnitude modulation (MM) when applied to a LINC amplification system. The simulation results show that the inclusion of the MM on the LINC processing chain is very favourable in terms of spectral regrowth introduced by signal's clipping distortion. The system is also more robust to gain and phase imbalances between amplifiers with only a marginal bit error rate (BER) loss for an uncoded transmission scenario.