The large amplitude variations of OFDM signals generate in-band distortion and out-of-band radiation. In recent years, cubic metric (CM) has been verified as a more accurate metric to measure the amplitude variations. In this paper, the PTS technique is used to decrease the CM of OFDM signals. To overcome the search complexity of an exhaustive search based PTS technique, we introduce an improved backtracking search (IBS) optimization algorithm. Simulations are conducted to show the advantages of the proposed IBS based PTS approach compared with the conventional OFDM, and several state-of-the-art methods in terms of search complexity and CM reduction performance.
