Investigation of Inter-User Interference Effect on 5G Uplink Communications

Manifold connected devices are expected in Fifth Generation (5G) wireless communication systems that may lead to serious interference issues among the User Equipments (UEs). This inter-user(s) interference certainly degrade the performance of devices in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER) and throughput. This paper investigates the impact of different modulation waveforms such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Modulation (OFDM), Filtered OFDM (F-OFDM) and Filtered Bank Multiple Carrier (FBMC) on the performance of devices in 5G uplink communications and sorts out which waveform provides optimal results in the presence of inter-user interference. To analyze the effect of inter-user interference, a general model is constructed consists of two cells each having single UE and a Base Station (BS) for simplicity. Pedestrian A channel model is chosen in this study, whereas Low-Density Polarity-Check (LDPC) coding scheme is considered for channel coding for all the considered waveforms. The performance of the system in terms of BER, throughput and Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) for the aforementioned waveforms are analyzed through simulation studies. According to simulation results, FBMC waveform generally outperforms OFDM and F-OFDM in all the performance metrics (i.e., BER, throughput and PAPR).