Design and Performance Tradeoffs of Alternative Multi-Carrier Waveforms for 5G

Future 5G systems are expected to address a much wider range of scenarios than current mobile communication systems. In addition to mobile broadband services, new applications like machine type communications and ultra-reliable communications need to be supported. Furthermore, a more flexible usage of the limited spectrum by the reduction of guard bands is essential to improve efficiency. These new requirements may not be best addressed by the currently applied waveforms such as Cyclic Prefix (CP) OFDM. Recently, several investigations on alternative multi-carrier waveforms have been conducted trying to fill this gap and to find new waveforms that best address diverse requirements. This paper discusses the design and performance tradeoffs of two alternative waveform families which are being considered in many research activities targeting future 5G systems: filter bank multicarrier with offset quadrature amplitude modulation (FBMC/OQAM) and filtered OFDM (F-OFDM). We give some technical background relevant to this topic and provide some new insights to the current ongoing discussions. Furthermore, we compare the properties and the performance under several 5G targeted scenarios.

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