QAM-FBMC: A New Multi-Carrier System for Post-OFDM Wireless Communications

Recently, as asynchronous heterogeneous network scenario becoming one of the key features for next generation wireless communications, superior spectrum confinement as well as higher spectral efficiency compared to cyclic prefixed orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CP-OFDM) has been taken into consideration for future radio access technologies. In this paper, we propose a new quadrature amplitude modulation based filter-bank multi-carrier (QAM-FBMC) system that provides with an inherent spectral efficiency gain against CP-OFDM, which comes from reduction of the redundancies such as cyclic prefix (CP) and guard-band, while keeping the symbol rate same as in CP-less OFDM. We propose a new transceiver structure consisting of at least two different filter-bank bases at both transmitter and receiver sides. Practical algorithms including channel estimation and equalization to mitigate multi-path fading channel without CP are proposed. Various evaluation results show that the proposed system performs comparable to the CP-OFDM system even without CP and guard-band reduction is also available from the well-confined spectrum.