Performance analysis of FBMC-PAM systems in frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channels in the presence of phase error

Although orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) schemes are widely used for their advantages related, for example, to the low complexity equalization, they present some issues related to the spectral efficiency reduction due to the insertion of the cyclic prefix and the contained out-of-band attenuation, and, moreover, to the strict synchronization requirements. Filter bank multicarrier (FBMC) techniques are emerging alternatives to OFDM for applications such as machine type communications or cognitive radio. In particular, the FBMC-PAM scheme based on a sine prototype filter assures a reduced system latency and is robust to carrier-frequency offset. In this paper the performance of FBMC-PAM systems in Rayleigh-fading frequency selective channels in the presence of a phase estimation error, is analyzed. Specifically, an analytical expression for the symbol error rate (SER) is derived and compared with simulation results.