Waveform contenders for 5G - suitability for short packet and low latency transmissions

In this paper we compare three candidate multicarrier waveforms for the air interface of 5G: CP-OFDM - the choice for 4G, FBMC - heavily discussed in recent years, and Universal Filtered Multi-Carrier (UFMC) - a new contender making its appearance recently. We judge their time-frequency efficiency when transmitting very small packets (e.g. for machine to machine communications) and under very tight response time requirements (e.g. for vehicle to vehicle communications). While FBMC is very efficient when transmitting long sequences, it suffers when having to transmit short bursts/frames. Due to the cyclic prefix and wide frequency guards, OFDM is rather inefficient. UFMC proofs to be the best choice, here, outperforming OFDM by about 10% in any case and FBMC in case of very short packets while performing similar for long sequences.