Filter-Bank Multicarrier Transmission for Drone-to-Earth Multicast Applications

Recent developments of 5G PHY-layer technology have evidenced the advantages taken by Filter-Bank Multicarrier (FBMC) waveforms against state-of-the-art Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) in terms of bandwidth efficiency and spectrum sharing capabilities. In this paper, we propose the use of FBMC for drone-to-earth multicast transmission in environmental monitoring applications. In particular, we consider FBMC with Offset Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (OQAM) and Hermite polynomials-based prototype filtering in order to efficiently manage the tradeoff between performance and spectral efficiency. The weighted frequency spreading methodology has been employed in order to implement the FBMC system as a simple and computationally-affordable extension of OFDM. The FBMC-based solution has been simulated and tested in a drone based multicast configuration and compared to the standard OFDM solution in terms of bandwidth efficiency, Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) and link performance in presence of multipath propagation. As result, FBMC-OQAM exhibits improved throughput efficiency and dramatically decreased Out-of-Band (OOB) emissions, while PAPR and BER performance achieved by the two multicarrier solutions look overall comparable. The spectrum slicing - naturally provided by FBMC and not allowed by OFDM - and long CP avoidance seem key, positive, features, in the framework of future adoption of FBMC in drone-based multicast applications, characterized by augmented flexibility, cognitivity and throughput efficiency.