The impact of out of band emissions: A measurement based performance comparison of UF-OFDM and CP-OFDM

Abstract

Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks, along with their recent releases, rely on the cyclic prefix orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CP-OFDM) waveform as the foundation. However, high side lobes, synchronization problems and spectral efficiency constraints of CP-OFDM cannot meet future requirements of cellular network design targets. At this point, universal filtered orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (UF-OFDM) emerges as a strong candidate. Equipped with the advantages of using filters, UF-OFDM provides additional design flexibility to address the fundamental problems of CP-OFDM. In this study, the effect of adjacent channels that causes interference between different frequency channels because of out-of-band (OoB) emissions on UF-OFDM performance is investigated by performing real-time tests on software defined radio (SDR) nodes with multiple reception paths. Frequency domain carrier frequency offset (CFO) and symbol timing offset (STO) correction techniques are used. By the application of the same correction approaches to CP-OFDM, these two waveforms are evaluated in terms of signal to noise ratio (SNR), bit/symbol error rate (BER/SER) and error vector magnitude (EVM). Test results indicate that, based on lower OoB emissions, UF-OFDM uses the spectrum more efficiently and provides better results than CP-OFDM in congested environments.