Multiplierless Filtered-OFDM Transmitter for Narrowband IoT Devices

In cyclic-prefix orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (CP-OFDM)-based radio access, the coexistence of different technologies without precise time-frequency synchronization is limited due to high out-of-band (OOB) emissions. Therefore, the spectrum enhancement techniques play a key role in relaxing the synchronization and power control requirements. This allows a higher degree of opportunistic spectrum use with minimized interference. In addition, all the transmitting devices have to fulfill specific transmitted signal quality requirements, including the maximum OOB radiated signal power. With the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)-based radio access, some additional signal processing for improved spectrum containment is commonly needed to achieve these requirements. The filtering and time-domain windowing are two fundamentally different approaches for spectrum enhancement. The filtered OFDM (F-OFDM) provides better spectrum localization than the time-windowing schemes [such as windowed overlap-add (WOLA)], with the cost of higher complexity. This article introduces low-complexity solutions for spectrally enhanced narrowband OFDM transmitters based on the use of lookup tables (LUTs). The proposed LUT approach, requiring only memory units and a low number of additions, allows to avoid all computationally expensive operations in online transmitter processing, as it builds the transmitted signal by summing the stored partial waveforms optimized offline. In certain cases, completely multiplication- and summation-free designs are possible. The transmitters of narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) devices are natural applications for the proposed LUT approach, as they require additional digital baseband signal processing to reach the emission requirements. It is shown that the proposed LUT schemes can provide significant savings in real-time computations of NB-IoT devices, while fulfilling the 3GPP requirements.