Block-filtered OFDM: A new promising waveform for multi-service scenarios

Abstract

5G will have to cope with a high degree of heterogeneity in terms of services and requirements. Among these latter, flexible and efficient use of all available non-contiguous spectrums for different network deployment scenarios is one challenge for the future 5G. To maximize spectrum efficiency, the 5G air interface technology will also need to be flexible and capable of mapping various services to the best suitable combinations of frequency and radio resources. Such requirements are not satisfied by legacy CP-OFDM and alternative multicarrier waveforms such as UFMC and FBMC partially meet them. In this article, we introduce a new quasi-orthogonal waveform called Block-Filtered OFDM (BF-OFDM) that combines most of the advantages of the aforementioned waveforms at the price of slight complexity increase. Spectral localization and performance in multi-user scenario will be enhanced w.r.t OFDM and simple equalization as well as all classical MIMO schemes can be straightforwardly considered. The proposed waveform offers the same performance in presence of multipath channel as CP-OFDM and is also scalable which paves the way for future multi-service scenarios.