Non-orthogonal waveforms for machine type communication

Machine type communication (MTC) is a typical scenario in 5G communication systems, and massive machine type communication (MMTC) is a main type of MTC. One prominent characteristic of MMTC is massive connections and sporadic transmission with short packets. To embrace the new challenge in 5G emerging scenarios, flexible filterbased waveforms have been widely studied recently. In this paper, we evaluate three candidate waveforms, i.e., orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), universal filtered multi-carrier (UFMC) and filtered-OFDM (F-OFDM) in MMTC. We conclude that UFMC and F-OFDM significantly reduce the out of band emission (OOBE) compared to OFDM. On the other hand, OFDM performs better than the other two non-orthogonal waveforms in terms of error performance for both frequency synchronous and asynchronous cases.