Abstract
5G will have to cope with a high degree of heterogeneity in terms of services and requirements. Among these latter, the flexible and efficient use of non-contiguous unused spectrum for different network deployment scenarios is considered a key challenge for 5G systems. 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. In this work, we propose a comparison of several 5G waveform candidates (OFDM, UFMC, FBMC and GFDM) under a common framework. We assess spectral efficiency, power spectral density, peak-to-average power ratio and robustness to asynchronous multi-user uplink transmission. Moreover, we evaluate and compare the complexity of the different waveforms. In addition to the complexity analysis, in this work, we also demonstrate the suitability of FBMC for specific 5G use cases via two experimental implementations. The benefits of these new waveforms for the foreseen 5G use cases are clearly highlighted on representative criteria and experiments.
Highlights
The Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) Alliance highlights in [1] the necessity to make more spectrum available in the existing sub-6 GHz radio bands and introduce new agile waveforms that exploit the existing underutilized fragmented spectrum, in order to satisfy specific fifth-generation (5G) operating scenarios
The goal of the waveform symbiosis will be to flexibly optimize the use of existing underutilized spectrum resources, guarantee interference-free coexistence with legacy transmissions and provide an improved spectral containment compared to the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation that is widely used in broadband wireless systems operating below 6 GHz
3GPP adopted it as the underlying physical layer (PHY) technology in mobile broadband systems denoted as 4G long-term evolution (LTE)
Summary
The Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) Alliance highlights in [1] the necessity to make more spectrum available in the existing sub-6 GHz radio bands and introduce new agile waveforms that exploit the existing underutilized fragmented spectrum, in order to satisfy specific fifth-generation (5G) operating scenarios. Gerzaguet et al EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking (2017) 2017:13 frequency division multiplexing (GFDM) [4] and filter bank multicarrier (FBMC) [5] This paper presents these popular candidate 5G waveforms and compares them in terms of specific performance features such as spectral efficiency, power spectral density and peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). 3.1 Spectral efficiency, power spectral density and PAPR comparison We consider the parameters based on LTE 10 MHz with QPSK modulation, a FFT size of 1024 (and a CP size of 72 samples) and a sampling frequency of 15.36 MHz. For FBMC-OQAM, the overlapping factor is set to 4 using the PHYDYAS filter [16]. The windowing effect for UFMC is different from GFDM as the windowing is applied on the receiver side, and has no consequences on the power spectral density of the transmitted signal It improves the performance in the multi-user scenario. Transceiver complexity should be managed and some concepts should be revisited (e.g. MIMO schemes, short packet adaptation) for a future deployment
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