Performance comparison of OFDM and multitone with polyphase filter bank for wireless communications

We present a performance comparison of two multicarrier modulation schemes (Bingham 1990), orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) (Cimini Jr., 1985) and multitone with polyphase filter bank (MPFB), in the presence of frequency offset and delay spread. The bit error rate (BER) for the two systems in an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and a two-ray Rayleigh fading channel is evaluated by computer simulation. It is shown that the sensitivity to frequency offset can be reduced by MPFB at the expense of larger bandwidth and higher complexity. It is also shown that the MPFB implementation is very sensitive to large delay spread.