A Comparison of CP-OFDM, PCC-OFDM and UFMC for 5G Uplink Communications

Polynomial-cancellation-coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (PCC-OFDM) is a form of OFDM that has waveforms which are very well localized in both the time and frequency domains and so it is ideally suited for use in the 5G network. This paper analyzes the performance of PCC-OFDM in the uplink of a multiuser system using orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) and compares it with conventional cyclic prefix OFDM (CP-OFDM), and universal filtered multicarrier (UFMC). PCC-OFDM is shown to be very much less sensitive to time and frequency offsets than either CP-OFDM or UFMC. For a given constellation size, PCC-OFDM in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) requires 3 dB lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for a given bit-error-rate, and the SNR advantage of PCC-OFDM increases rapidly when there are timing and/or frequency offsets. For PCC-OFDM no frequency guard-band is required between different OFDMA users. PCC-OFDM is completely compatible with CP-OFDM and adds negligible complexity and latency, because it uses a simple mapping of data onto pairs of subcarriers at the transmitter, and a simple weighting-and-adding of pairs of subcarriers at the receiver. The weighting-and-adding step, which has been omitted in some of the literature, is shown to contribute substantially to the SNR advantage of PCC-OFDM. A disadvantage of PCC-OFDM (without overlapping) is the potential reduction in spectral efficiency because subcarriers are modulated in pairs, but this reduction is more than regained because no guard band is required and because, for a given channel, larger constellations can be used.