Non-orthogonal waveforms for machine type communication

Machine type communication (MTC) is a typical scenario in 5G communication systems, and massive machine type communication (MMTC) is a main type of MTC. One prominent characteristic of MMTC is massive connections and sporadic transmission with short packets. To embrace the new challenge in 5G emerging scenarios, flexible filter-based waveforms have been widely studied recently. In this paper, we evaluate three candidate waveforms, i.e., orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), universal filtered multi-carrier (UFMC) and filtered-OFDM (F-OFDM) in MMTC. We conclude that UFMC and F-OFDM significantly reduce the out of band emission (OOBE) compared to OFDM. On the other hand, OFDM performs better than the other two non-orthogonal waveforms in terms of error performance for both frequency synchronous and asynchronous cases.