Computational Complexity Analysis of Advanced Physical Layers based on Multicarrier Modulation
01 January 2011
In this contribution we thoroughly analyze the computational effort necessary in implementing a multicarrier based physical layer for wireless communications. We consider two variations of the multicarrier modulation concept, namely traditional cyclic prefix based orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CP-OFDM) and filter bank based (FBMC) systems. First we give the analytical formulas for the computational complexity of both systems by taking into account the turbo channel decoding and the multicarrier modulation, demodulation and equalization. Based on the specifications from WiMAX, we present a numerical comparison between both systems, where they occupy the same bandwidth and possess the same throughput. From the examples, it can be concluded that, for a certain bit error ratio the two alternatives present a similar computational complexity but CP-OFDM still has to deploy 1.7 dB more energy per information bit than FBMC in order to achieve the same performance.
