Waveform performance for asynchronous wireless 5G uplink communications

Machine type communications (MTC) could play a significant role in fifth generation (5G) wireless communications systems. In terms of reducing the side-lobes of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) to support large numbers of asynchronous MTC devices, several waveform designs could be used. This paper provides closed form signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and capacity results for this asynchronous scenario. We compare three candidate multi-carrier waveforms, which are OFDM, universal filtered multi-carrier (UFMC) and polynomial cancellation coded (PCC-OFDM). Our results indicate that both PCC and UFMC can provide better frequency roll-off than OFDM. PCC is more easier to implement and performs strongly against inter carrier interference (ICI) with cost of losing spectral efficiency and a higher peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). UFMC is more robust to very dispersive multipath channels but with cost of increasing computational complexity.