A Field Trial of f-OFDM toward 5G

To improve the spectrum utilization and enable flexible waveform for 5G, a new waveform framework, named filtered OFDM (f-OFDM), has been introduced in previous study. In the past year, f-OFDM was verified for the first-time in a 5G joint trial by NTT DOCOMO and Huawei in Chengdu, China. Here in this paper, more details on f-OFDM including the filter design and the implementation are discussed, together with substantial prototyping results. The field test results suggest that f-OFDM provides a reduced spectrum leakage and thus enhanced spectrum efficiency over the conventional OFDM which is used in 4G LTE networks. The capability of supporting multiple asynchronous subband transmissions of filtered-OFDM are also verified, where the performance loss resulting from neighboring but asynchronous transmissions are confirmed to be negligible.