An Investigation of Flexible Waveform Numerologies for 5G V2I Cellular Networks from a Physical Layer Perspective

In the context of 5th generation (5G) wireless networks, the overall performance improvement together with excellent levels of user experience/satisfaction and a variety of intelligent services are of great importance. The physical layer implementation, and in particular the waveform schemes and modulation techniques, need to offer sufficient flexibility, high interference immunity, efficient spectrum utilization, reduced Out-of-Band (OOB) emissions etc. This is especially important in high mobility scenarios such as Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications in Ultra Dense Networks (UDN). In this paper, the effects on downlink communication of different waveforms based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) using distinct numerology settings are compared. Several scenarios are introduced that take into account the impact of channel delay spread and the speed of User Equipment (UE) movement on achieving better vehicular UDN network performance. Finally, this work's research findings on the advantages and drawbacks of using flexible numerology-based waveform approaches in vehicular UDNs are summarized.