Multi-carrier modulation analysis and WCP-COQAM proposal

In the vision towards future radio systems, where access to information and sharing of data is to be available anywhere and anytime to anyone for anything, a wide variety of applications and services are therefore envisioned. This naturally calls for a more flexible system to support. Moreover, the demand for drastically increased data traffic, as well as the fact of spectrum scarcity, would eventually force future spectrum access to a more dynamic fashion. For addressing the challenges, a powerful and flexible physical layer technology must be prepared, which naturally brings us to the question whether the legacy of the OFDM system can still fit in this context. In fact, during the past years, extensive research effort has been made in this area and several enhanced alternatives have been reported in the literature. Nevertheless, up to date, all of the proposed schemes have advantages and disadvantages. In this paper, we give a detailed analysis on these well-known schemes from different aspects and point out their open issues. Then, we propose a new scheme that aims to maximally overcome the identified drawbacks of its predecessors while still trying to keep their advantages. Simulation results illustrate the improvement achieved by our proposal.