Orthogonal Versus Novel Orthogonal Pulse Shaped Waveforms for Future Generation Wireless Communication Systems

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system is not suitable for fifth-generation (5G) applications as it has strict synchronization requirement, high out of band (OBB) leakage due to use of rectangular pulse shaping, less spectrum efficiency due to use of cyclic prefix (CP), high bit error rate (BER), etc. Pulse shape waveforms have been proposed to be a suitable candidate for 5G. This paper investigates OFDM, single carrier frequency division multiple access (SCFDMA), filter bank multi-carrier (FBMC), and generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM) waveforms. It has been observed that pulse-based techniques have better performance in terms of BER, PAPR, and spectrum efficiency. The comparative study reveals that OFDM has the highest PAPR while the FBMC system has the lowest value among the four systems investigated.