Evaluation of UFMC as a Potential Waveform Contender of OFDM for Next-Generation Wireless

A number of waveforms have recently been proposed to replace the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for the next-generation wireless systems. Among them, the universal filtered multi-carrier (UFMC) stands out to be a promising modulation method for the fifth-generation (5G) and beyond. The performance of the UFMC scheme is investigated in this paper and it is compared to that of OFDM. Specifically, the power spectral density (PSD) of the UFMC signal and the bit-error-ratio (BER) of the UFMC-based communication system are investigated for different numbers of subcarriers used and for different filter length values. Furthermore, the performance of UFMC and that of OFDM are compared under similar values of system parameters. Our simulations demonstrate that UFMC is capable of flexibly performing for the next-generation wireless and may thus be a promising next-generation waveform.