Spectral Efficiency Improvement with Filtered OFDM for IoT Applications in 5G/6G

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) in its original form is not suitable for 5G/6G applications owing to less spectrum efficiency, high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), high out-of-band emission (OOBE), and synchronization requirements, etc. Filtered OFDM is one of the potential waveform candidates for low-cost/complex IoT devices for 5G/6G communication systems. In the present work, a filtered OFDM technique has been proposed to reduce the computational complexity of the transceiver. Performance analysis based on mathematical modeling and Matlab simulations of F-OFDM has been carried out for asynchronous input signals. The channel under investigation has been considered as corrupted with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). When compared to OFDM, it has been observed that in the F-OFDM system, there is a 3 dB reduction in PAPR and a 10 dB reduction in OOBE with slight degradation (0.01 at 30 dB SNR) in its BER. It has reduced the computational complexities of the transceiver and is mostly suitable for low-cost IoT applications in 5G/6G communication systems.