Performance Investigation of New Waveforms in CRAN Architecture for 5G Communication Systems

In this paper, an investigation of system performance is addressed for new emergent air interface waveforms for 5G communication systems and beyond applications. Therefore, filter-bank multi-carrier (FBMC) and universal filtered multi-carrier (UBMC) are compared to the classical OFDM waveform in the context of the cloud radio access network (CRAN) architecture. In addition, additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and chromatic dispersion due to single-mode-fiber (SMF) are the main system limitations that are considered in the system performance study. Likewise, the system performance is carried out through power spectral density and constellation diagrams for both pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) high order format. Finally, it is demonstrated that FBMC-PAM waveform outperforms both UBMC-QAM and OFDM- QAM in terms of power spectral density and robustness against AWGN and chromatic dispersion.