Universal Filtered Multi-carrier Performance Analysis with Multipath Fading Channels

The anticipated services of the 5th Generation mobile networks (5G) requires new technologies to be introduced and to be thoroughly investigated in order to assess their ability to satisfy the new 5G system requirements. The main focus of this paper is the relaxed system synchronization procedures used to meet the new 5G requirements which cannot be satisfied by strictly synchronized OFDM systems and their costly synchronization procedures The most promising technology to replace OFDM in 5G is Universal Filtered Multi-Carrier (UFMC) whose performance has already been assessed in literature where the main focus was proving the enhanced performance of UFMC in presence of Carrier Frequency Offsets (CFO) and Timing Offsets (TO) arising from the reduced synchronization limitations. In this paper we address a new aspect of UFMC performance by investigating its capability to overcome the multipath fading channels' effects and to provide good and reliable performance levels without using the cyclic prefix concept introduced in OFDM to overcome these channel effects.