Effectiveness of filter bank multicarrier modulation for 5G wireless communications

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) scheme may not be the optimum solution for 5G scenarios because of its spectrum leakage, high peak to average power ratio (PAPR) and the requirement of strict temporal and frequency synchronization. These limitations are likely to be overcome by filter bank multicarrier (FBMC) modulation which uses pulse shaping principle to reduce the problem of spectral leakage. Moreover, the users in FBMC do not need to be synchronized before they gain access to the uplink of the communication system. However, FBMC and conventional OFDM have not yet been compared in terms of bit error rate (BER) performance in the combined presence of Nakagami fading, shadowing, path loss and channel noise. This paper presents simulation results on the BER performance of FBMC and OFDM considering these combined channel impairments. The comparison is also done in terms of PAPR factor and complexity. Results indicate that FBMC shows significantly better BER performance than OFDM for the combined presence of these impairments. However, for the cases considered, FBMC can be slightly inferior to OFDM in terms of PAPR factor. In addition, FBMC is approximately ten times more complex than OFDM for a given subcarrier number.