Multirate 5G Downlink Performance Comparison for f-OFDM and w-OFDM Schemes with Different Numerologies

One of the main open problems for next generation wireless networks, is to find the new OFDM-based waveform to be used in 5G. The new modulation scheme must primarily be able to achieve higher spectral efficiency than its predecessor. The main 3GPP's candidate is a new version of OFDM, called Filtered Orthogonal Frequency-Division Modulation (f-OFDM), which is similar to OFDM but with additional filtering in order to reduce Out-Of-Band (OOB) emissions and to obtain a better spectral-localization. Another option is windowed-OFDM (w-OFDM), which is basically a classical OFDM scheme where each symbol is windowed and overlapped in the time domain. In this paper we compare classic OFDM signals using Cyclic Prefix (CP-OFDM) with f-OFDM and w-OFDM, each one with multiple parametric options and numerologies. A multirate transmitter simultaneously operating with multiple numerologies is considered, where the transmitted sub-bands must be up-sampled and interpolated in order to generate the composite numerical signal fed to the Digital to Analog Converter (DAC). Finally, we discuss advantages and disadvantages of the various schemes.