WOLA processing: A useful tool for windowed waveforms in 5G with relaxed synchronicity

Abstract

One of the main 5G issues is to enable flexible multiple access to fragmented spectrum with relaxed synchronicity. Unfortunately, the classical OFDM cannot fulfill this criterion, since a tight synchronization is essential to ensure free-distortion multiple access. Windowing is one of the most popular approaches that have been proposed to overcome this problem. In this paper, we investigate the enhancement that can provide Weighted Overlap and Add (WOLA) processing to basic windowed waveforms. To this end, two schemes are considered W-OFDM and WCP-COQAM. The obtained results show that the proposed WOLA-OFDM and WOLA-COQAM schemes outperform the basic windowed ones confirming thus the effectiveness of WOLA processing as a powerful tool for windowed waveforms in multiuser asynchronous access.