5G waveform competition: Performance comparison and analysis of OFDM and FBMC in slow fading and fast fading channels

Abstract

An analysis of an emerging physical layer multicarrier (MC), waveform Filter Bank Multi Carrier (FBMC) with Orthogonal frequency division Multiplexing (OFDM) waveform under variety of channels has been performed. Filter banks are the advanced form of MC sub band processing and promise to deliver better results than OFDM. These filter banks exploit the shortcomings arising due to the usage of Fast Fourier transforms (FFT) at the trade-off of adding complexity to the systems i.e. Poly-Phase Filter Networks (PPN). We investigate transceivers design, out of band Emission (OOB), Power Spectral Density (PSD), Bit Error Probability (BEP) for these waveform. We validate our analyses through simulations ascertaining FBMC’s performance better than OFDM which makes it an ideal candidate for 5G physical layer.