Low-Complexity Modem Design for GFDM

Due to its attractive properties, generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM) is recently being discussed as a candidate waveform for the fifth generation of wireless communication systems (5G). GFDM is introduced as a generalized form of the widely used orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation scheme and since it uses only one cyclic prefix (CP) for a group of symbols rather than a CP per symbol, it is more bandwidth efficient than OFDM. In this paper, we propose novel modem structures for GFDM by taking advantage of the particular structure in the modulation matrix. Our proposed transmitter is based on modulation matrix sparsification through application of fast Fourier transform (FFT) to reduce the implementation complexity. A unified demodulator structure for matched filter (MF), zero forcing (ZF), and minimum mean square error (MMSE) receivers is also derived. The proposed demodulation techniques harness the special block circulant property of the matrices involved in the demodulation stage to reduce the computational cost of the system implementation. We have derived the closed forms for the ZF and MMSE receiver filters. Additionally, our algorithms do not incur any performance loss as they maintain the optimal performance. The computational costs of our proposed techniques are analyzed in detail and are compared with the existing solutions that are known to have the lowest complexity. It is shown that through application of our structures a substantial amount of computational complexity reduction can be achieved.