Relaxed Synchronization Support of Universal Filtered Multi-Carrier including Autonomous Timing Advance

5G wireless systems may benefit by waveforms supporting relaxed synchronization, as this enables reduced energy consumption, better support of low-end devices and reduction of signaling overhead. In this paper we evaluate UFMC (Universal Filtered MultiCarrier) a.k.a. UFMC (universal filtered OFDM) - the recently appeared waveform option for 5G - with respect to its performance in scenarios with relaxed synchronization. Both carrier frequency offset (CFO, e.g. due to low-cost oscillators used in low-end devices) and relative fractional delay (e.g. due to the absence of an energy consuming closed-loop ranging mechanism) is considered. We introduce a concept called autonomous timing advance (ATA) improving the overall system performance. With ATA the system can operate purely based on open-loop synchronization. For comparing UFMC with CP-OFDM, we evaluate the mean squared error (MSE) in the receiver after frequency conversion. With applying a limit regarding the tolerable amount of distortion, we calculate the supported link distance for a system applying either UFMC or CP-OFDM for LTE-like settings. If applying UFMC link distances of several kms are supported, while if applying CP-OFDM only few hundreds of meters are possible.