A study on the physical layer performance of GFDM for high throughput wireless communication

In this paper, we investigate the physical layer (PHY) performance of generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM) for high throughput wireless communication. For comparison purposes, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based IEEE 802.11ac PHY is used as a benchmark. Harnessing the flexibility of GFDM, we propose a novel configuration, being compliant to the IEEE 802.11ac PHY for data transmission. With that configuration, we can achieve not only lower out-of-band (OOB) emission performance but also higher spectral efficiency. By further deriving the corresponding receiver, the overall GFDM-based PHY implementation is shown to attain better frame error rates (FERs) under various modulation and coding schemes (MCSs). Moreover, at the signal to noise ratios (SNRs) where the target FER of 10% is fulfilled, GFDM can also provide higher throughput than OFDM.