Hardware experiments on multi-carrier waveforms for 5G

Emerging new applications, such as Internet of Things (IoT), gigabit wireless connectivity, tactile internet, and many more are expected to impose new and diverse requirements on the design of the fifth generation (5G) of cellular communication systems. In recent years, many alternative multicarrier waveforms are being investigated with the aim to identify to what extent it would be possible to better address these diverse requirements compared to Cyclic Prefix (CP) OFDM, which is currently adopted by LTE/LTE-Advanced. 

However, most of these investigations considered in many research activities have focused on theoretical considerations or simulations and mainly with emphasis on only one alternative waveform. In this paper, we present ongoing work based on measurement results where real hardware experiments are conducted to investigate the performance of three waveform families: CP-OFDM, filter bank multicarrier with offset quadrature amplitude modulation (FBMC/OQAM) and universal-filtered OFDM (UF-OFDM). 

FBMC/OQAM has the benefit of very low sidelobes leading to less inter-carrier interference in asynchronous and high mobility scenarios, whereas the typically long filter leads to low efficiency for short blocks and the use of OQAM makes it nontrivial to adopt certain schemes well-developed for CP-OFDM. UF-OFDM combines the benefits of CP-OFDM with the advantage of significantly lower out-of-band radiation while avoiding the drawbacks of FBMC/OQAM. In this paper we compare the performance of these alternative waveforms under several 5G targeted scenarios.