Link Level Comparative Study between OFDM and FBMC

Fifth generation (5G) network is the new version of mobile communication which is expected to be commercialized around 2020. The requirement of higher data rate, lower latency and larger user capacity, compared to current fourth generation (4G) LTE networks, force 5G to adopt better modulation technologies. Recently, filter-bank multicarrier with offset quadrature amplitude modulation (FBMC-OQAM) is reported and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) could be replaced by FBMC since FBMC has higher spectral efficiency and lower out-of-band emission. In this paper, the comparison between OFDM and FBMC in bit error rate (BER), error vector magnitude (EVM), peak to average power ratio (PAPR), and power spectral density (PSD) is obtained. The simulation results reveal FBMC has nearly the same performance in BER, EVM and PAPR as OFDM but has better performance in PSD. However, since FBMC needs OQAM, the computational complexity of FBMC is higher than OFDM.