Physical Layer Performance Modeling of Modern Multicarrier Modulation Techniques

The fifth-generation (5G) and beyond standards are being challenged by the diverse requirements of modern use cases. Multicarrier modulation techniques are one of the key components of the physical layer (PHY) design, which has immense potential to improve efficiency and reliability. In current state-of-the-art wireless technologies (i.e., NR and IEEE 802.11ax) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is used which has many disadvantages such as peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), out-of-band emission (OOBE), and sensitivity to carrier frequency offset (CFO). To overcome these drawbacks several alternate multicarrier modulation techniques are being considered, such as discrete Fourier transform-spread-OFDM (DFT-s-OFDM), generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM), and orthogonal time-frequency space (OTFS). In this paper, we develop the physical layer abstraction (PLA) of these candidate multicarrier techniques to evaluate their performance under various use cases and scenarios. The PLA is a commonly used technique to avoid time-consuming PHY simulations in system-level simulators. To improve the accuracy of PLA in different fading conditions, we derive a fitting parameter as a function of the received signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) variance. The validation results show that performance can be accurately estimated through the proposed multicarrier PLA. Moreover, PLA techniques are at least thousands of times faster compared to PHY simulations.