A Novel FBMC/OQAM Scheme Facilitating MIMO FDMA without the Need for Guard Bands

In filterbank multicarrier systems with offset QAM signaling (FBMC/OQAM), real-field orthogonality is usually not sufficient to yield a frequency isolation of two resource blocks with different MIMO precoding for spatial multiplexing or beamforming. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme to avoid inter-block interference by adopting single band (SSB) filtering on the edge subcarriers of each block. Such filtering is able to maintain the real-field orthogonality condition for the subcarriers within a block while attaining the complex-field orthogonality at the block edges. To support the proposed bi-uniform filterbank structure, a novel resource mapping scheme is devised. Through simulation results it is shown that the proposed scheme can efficiently support pre-coded MIMO transmission in FBMC, achieving the same BLER performance as in OFDM.