Low complexity FBMC with Filtered OFDM for 5G wireless systems

Filter Bank Multicarrier (FBMC) and Filtered OFDM (f-OFDM) are among the preferred waveform candidates for 5G. However, f-OFDM is considered as more favourable compared to FBMC, since maximal spectrally efficient FBMC systems face inherent interference from sub-carriers. Cancelling out this interference requires filters with long impulse responses. Also to deal with the highly frequency selective channels, without complex receivers, we need more number of sub-carriers. These in turn increase system latency and complexity. However, using some filter design techniques we can reduce the inherent interference, and with proper channel equalization we can even work with lower number of sub-carriers in FBMC. In this paper we present an analysis of FBMC based wireless systems that possess a lower number of sub-carriers, which perform inherently better than f-OFDM system in terms of latency and BER and also has lower computational complexity. Simulations reveal that FBMC system shows almost an 10 dB improvement in BER performance compared to f-OFDM system.