An Enabling Waveform for 5G - QAM-FBMC: Initial Analysis

In this paper, we identified the challenges and requirements for the waveform design of the fifth generation mobile communication networks (5G) and compared Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) based waveforms with Filter Bank Multicarrier (FBMC) based ones. Recently it has been shown that Quadrature-Amplitude Modulation (QAM) transmission and reception can be enabled in FBMC by using multiple prototype filters, resulting in a new waveform: QAMFBMC. Here, the transceiver architecture and signal model of QAM-FBMC are presented and channel estimation error and RF impairment, e.g., phase noise, are modeled. In addition, initial evaluation is made in terms of out-of-band (OOB) emission and complexity. The simulation results show that QAM-FBCM can achieve the same BER performance as cyclic-prefix (CP) OFDM without spectrum efficiency reduction due to the adding of CP. Different equalization schemes are evaluated and the effect of channel estimation error is investigated. Moreover, effects of the phase noise are evaluated and QAM-FBMC is shown to be robust to the phase noise. Keywords—5G; QAM-FBMC; channel estimation; equalization; phase noise