Performance of emerging multi-carrier waveforms for 5G asynchronous communications

This paper presents an extensive and fair comparison among the most promising waveform contenders for the 5G air interface. The considered waveform contenders, namely filter-bank multi-carrier (FBMC), universal-filtered multi-carrier (UFMC), generalized frequency-division multiplexing (GFDM) and resource-block filtered orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (RB-F-OFDM) are compared to OFDM used in 4G in terms of spectral efficiency, numerical complexity, robustness towards multi-user interference (MUI) and resilience to power amplifier non-linearity. FBMC shows the best spectral containment and reveals to be almost insensitive to multi-user interference. It however suffers from its bad spectral efficiency for short bursts and from its poor multiple input multiple output (MIMO) compatibility. GFDM reveals to be the most promising contender, with the best spectral efficiency and the smallest complexity overhead compared to OFDM. It is also the most resilient to multi-user interference after FBMC and is MIMO compatible as soon as the interference can be managed. UFMC and RB-F-OFDM are finally the closest to OFDM and benefit therefore from a better compatibility with existing systems, even if their performance is generally lower than FBMC and GFDM.