Unified multiple access structure based on FBMC modulation for multi-RAT coexistence in heterogeneous wireless networks

With the evolution of the fifth generation (5G) and beyond heterogeneous wireless networks, telecommunications operators and researchers are driven to develop advanced transmission technologies that enable the coexistence of multiple radio access technologies (multi-RATs). By employing the efficient implementation of filter-bank multi-carrier (FBMC) transceiver and the scalable matrix transformation (SMT) module, in this study, a unified multiple access architecture termed as FBMC-SMT is proposed, which is capable of flexibly integrating with both 3G and 4G transmission schemes and improving the system performance. As a special case of FBMC-SMT, the performance evaluation of FBMC-CDMA is conducted by extensive simulation. It is verified that FBMC-CDMA with 16 subbands allocated outperforms the traditional single carrier wideband code division multiple access when the number of code channels assigned is larger than 5. Moreover, the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio analysis of FBMC-SMT is also given and matches the simulation results very well. Hence, the proposed FBMC-SMT can serve as a unified architecture to flexibly integrate multi-RATs, thus to meet variable application requirements in 5G and beyond heterogeneous wireless networks.