A review on 5G modulation schemes and their comparisons for future wireless communications

The broadband data consumption has increased at a rapid rate to cope with the state of the art technology and features in the form of mobile phones which are smart and can execute various functions. The system capacity on the whole has to be increased to accommodate the latest wireless applications. This enhancement can be done by accessing new spectrum with increased data rates. With the ever increasing demand for frequency spectrum and resource availability limitation, Spectrum Pooling has gained immense popularity. The statistics show that most of the spectrum which is licensed is not utilized all the time. Spectrum Pooling or Sharing is the idea of using these spectrum holes or white spaces. In Dynamic Spectrum Access a secondary or a Cognitive user is capable of transmitting over distributed frequencies, while not interfering with the primary user. This leads to Multicarrier communication transmitting data across the channel in various frequency subcarriers at a reduced data rate Filter Bank Multi-Carrier, Universal Filtered Multi-Carrier, Generalized Frequency Division Multiplexing and Filtered Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing are the potential competent new waveforms for 5G communication systems. This paper presents a review of the most capable waveform contenders for the 5G air interface. The parameters like efficiency in spectrum utilization, complexity and robustness of these waveforms are compared to OFDM which is being used in 4G.