Filter bank multi carrier based MIMO system for 5G wireless communication

Filter Bank Multicarrier (FBMC) transmission technique is a primary candidate for upcoming wireless communication standard 5G. It is also considered as an alternative to the famous Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). To ensure interference free communication, OFDM utilizes Cyclic Prefix (CP) along with a rectangular pulse shaped filter. Which renders OFDM spectrally inefficient, when incorporated over large arrays of antennas. The FBMC can overcome this problem by using a different modulation scheme and a specialized prototype filter. We started this study by presenting a detailed analysis of an FBMC system. Furthermore, the FBMC system is interfaced with a Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) antenna system with different antenna array sizes. We begin with a 2 × 2 antenna array and then we perform experiments with 8, 16 and 32 transmit and receive antennas. Signaling and channel specifications are different for each case. The performance of each system is measured using Zero forcing (ZF) and Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) equalizers. Bit Error Rate (BER) is measured against normalized Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) or Eb/No for each system. The results of this study show that FBMC with MIMO depicts a satisfactory improvement in performance. For the 2 × 2 MIMO system MMSE outperforms the ZF equalizer. Moreover, a significant decrease in BER was observed as the array size was increased.