Transparent spectral confinement approach for 5G

This paper proposes a transparent spectral confinement approach for OFDM to enable multiplexing of multiple services with diverse requirements in one system band. Besides mobile broadband services, new service types like machine type and ultra-reliable low latency communications foreseen for future 5G systems set new requirements for the chosen waveform to support asynchronous access and multiplexing different numerologies. That is not best handled by OFDM as it is. Thus, various spectral confinement techniques have been proposed in the literature, which, however, require specific processing at both the transmitter and receiver. This tight link would increase signaling overheads to agree on both sides to apply certain respective processing. The transparent approach proposed in this paper decouples the tight link and thus keeps the system simple and robust. We show by means of numerical evaluations that OFDM with spectral confinement techniques like windowing or filtering at the transmitter, but without respective receiver processing, outperforms the conventional OFDM.