Comparison and evaluation between FBMC and OFDM systems

This paper studies the analytical bit error probability (BEP) of filter bank based multicarrier (FBMC) transmission and conventional cyclic prefix (CP) based orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. We first compare and evaluate these two schemes under the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, and then extend the results to the Rayleigh channel. Closed form expressions of the bit error probabilities for both two methods are derived and validated in this research. The results reveal that the performance of these two methods are the same when the perfect reconstruction conditions of them are satisfied. However, the FBMC technique has less outof- band power leakage as a result of lower side lobes. Meanwhile, the omission of CP improves the bandwidth efficiency of the system with a increase in the equalization complexity.