Comparison of PHY layers candidate to 5G

Maxime BETUING, Pierre ETIENNE, Lucas LHARIDON, Etienne VIGNAUD, Ibrahima TOURE,
Benjamin HARROUE, Ayoub TARSIMI, Maxime BESSET
mbetuing@enseirb-matmeca.fr, pietienne@enseirb-matmeca.fr, llharidon@enseirb-matmeca.fr,
evignaud@enseirb-matmeca.fr, itoure@enseirb-matmeca.fr, bharroue@enseirb-matmeca.fr,
atarsimi@enseirb-matmeca.fr, mbesset@enseirb-matmeca.fr

Abstract. The purpose of this project is to compare the performances of waveforms suitable for 5G through a panel of
criteria: Bit Error Rate, spectral efficiency, peak-to-average power ratio. Indeed, the opportunity now arises to use 5G
modulation scheme that can modify these criteria and thereby improve efficiency.

Introduction
Nowadays, almost everything needs internet: mobile phones, computers, tablets, cars, etc Applications require more
and more data and so networks have to be improved to increase their data rate, but without increasing the spectrum bandwidth
and the emission power. A big step has been made with the 4G OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing).
However, because of the use of cyclic prefixes and guard bands to avoid too big side lobes, there is a loss of 16% of spectral
efficiency compared to theoretical performance. Several techniques have already been proposed to solve that problems for
the 5G like Generalized Frequency Division Multiplexing (GFDM), Universal Filtered MultiCarrier (UFMC), FilterBank
MultiCarrier (FBMC) and MultiCarrier Faster-Than-Nyquist (MC-FTN).

OFDM
Theoretical
OFDM is an orthogonal waveform, orthogonal in time and in frequency. The orthogonality in time is ensured with the
use of a cyclic prefix for each OFDM symbol, which has the advantage to transform the convolution of the channel in a
circular one. However, this method implies a loss of spectral efficiency. Frequency orthogonality is ensured by the frequency
shift of each subcarrier and the guard band introduced enables to avoid spectral overlapping between adjacent symbols. That
last point also introduces a loss of spectral efficiency.
Transmitter/ Receiver (Tx/Rx) OFDM
A Tx/Rx chain was implemented using MATLAB to test OFDM performances. The goal was to send and receive an
image of a tiger with two USRPs linked to two computers. The chosen OFDM characteristics were:
-

QPSK symbols
Constellation phase: phi = pi/4
Total number of subcarriers: N = 256
Number of useful subcarriers: Nu = 128
Cyclic prefixes: CP = 16 symbols

A preamble was added before the useful signal in order to do a time and frequency synchronization. Then, every 6 OFDM
symbols a full OFDM symbol was used as reference frame so as to use a Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) equalizer
to counter the channel effects.

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Ref frame

Ref frame

Ref frame

Nu subcarriers (frequency)

OFDM symbols (time)

Figure 1: Time-frequency representation

The cyclic prefix introduced of 16 symbols implies a 6% loss of spectral efficiency. The fact to use the half of the total
subcarriers for the band guards means that there is a 50% loss of spectral efficiency.
After having completed the Tx/Rx chain with USRPs, the Bit Error Rate (BER) was computed for several Signal-to-Noise
Ratio (SNR) using the tiger image.
1

BER

BER

0,1
0,01
0,001

0,0001
0,00001
0

10

15
SNR in dB

20

25

30

Figure 2: BER against SNR

In term of Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR), the signal created with the tiger image gives 18 dB which is very high,
and the problem of a too high PAPR is that the peaks may be cut by the transmitters amplifiers.

FBMC
Purpose
FBMC is a multi-carrier wave-form which has been developed in order to offer a more flexible and performant (regarding
data rate) OFDM-based architecture.
Indeed, due to out of band emission caused by OFDMs transmission signal (cardinal sinus shaped), a precise frequency
synchronisation is needed for OFDM communications between the emission and reception side.
Moreover, a cyclic prefix is inserted for each OFDM symbol in order to ensure temporal orthogonality implies a significant
decrease equal to

!"# %
!&# '!"#

regarding the data rate which is no longer needed for FBMC communications ( being the
!"

modulation order).

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Implementation of a filter bank

FBMC can be seen as an OFDM based, in which the shaping filter is not a door but a specific Nyquist filter which purpose
is to shape the signal into a form that does not present any out of band emissions. Let be each subcarriers filter length and
K the filters overlapping factor ( = 2 1). Due to the filters size, neighbouring sub-channels overlaps in the frequency
domain which causes inter carrier interferences and thus, the incapability of decoding the transmitted message. However, a
key observation is that the subcarriers with even index (odd index) do not overlap.

Figure 3: Two subcarriers frequency responses overlapping

Figure 4: Illustration of neighbouring channel

OQAM Modulation
Given the previous observation regarding frequency domain overlapping, FBMC uses a specific modulation called OQAM
(for Offset-QAM) that guarantees inter-carrier orthogonally.
Indeed, the real part of the data is transmitted on even subcarriers and the imaginary part on odd subcarriers to ensure that
the data will not interfere. However, using this scheme, the data rate is halfed given the fact that for N data symbols, 2N
subcarriers are needed to transmit the information which is not a relevant choice. The strategy to reach full capacity is to
double the symbol rate and transmit for each complex data symbol its real/imaginary parts un-simultaneously (if its real part
!
is transmitted at = 3 , its imaginary part will be transmitted at = 3 + " , restoring thusly full capacity of the
5
data rate).
Transmitter

M Q-PSK symbols are generated and transformed into 2M OQAM symbols.

The half is filtered and fed to IFFT inputs at nT0, the other half at nT0+T0/2.

The discrete time formulation of the transmitted signal, sampled at the rate T0/2 is given by the following formula:
(%;() '8

[]
B:C 9:;8

E5FB(G%;()/5
E5FBI

%
;
% EJK,M
2

Equalization
In case of frequency selective channel, equalization is necessary in order to correct the transmission channel's distortion
effects. The equalizer is implemented in the frequency domain. The system exploits 2K-1 sub-carriers per sub-channel and
equalization is required at the frequencies of these 2K-1 sub-carriers. The frequency coefficients of the equalizer are calculated after channel estimation.

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Figure 5: BER against SNR for FBMC waveform

UFMC
Presentation
The next waveform is an alternative waveform to FBMC: UFMC which stands for Universal Filtered MultiCarrier. In
this waveform, the filtering operation is applied to a group of consecutive subcarriers instead of per-subcarrier filtering used
in FBMC. The group of subcarriers is called the sub band, and B is the number of UFMC sub bands. Thus, UFMC can be
considered as a generalization of both FBMC, where B is equal to the number of subcarriers, and OFDM, where B is equal
to one. That's why this waveform is also called UF-OFDM: Universal Filtered OFDM.
Tx/Rx
The UFMC transmitter is composed by three main parts:
First, the complex symbols are divided in B groups and each group is processed by an IDFT filter.
Then, each IDFT output is filtered. The filter chosen in this project is a Dolph-Tchebychev one.
Finally, all the sub bands vectors are summed to obtain just one N+L-1 sized vector, where N is the IDFT
number of points and L is the filter length.
In term of matrix, the transmitters equation becomes: x = F.V.S = T.S, where S is the B*n sized symbol vector, V is the (N,
B*n) IDFT sized matrix and F is the (N+L-1, N) filter matrix.
The UFMC receiver is just the reverse process. Considering matrix, the equation is z = pinv(T)y, where y is the received
vector after being disturbed by both the channel and the reception noise, and pinv(T) is the T Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse
matrix.
Then, an equalization block is added in order to compensate the channel effects.
Advantages/disadvantages
The main advantage of UFMC is the use of Dolph-Tchebychev filter. Indeed, according to these filter properties, the
spectral OFDM effect of side lobes interference on the immediate adjacent subcarrier can be significantly reduced. By these
properties, two OFDM issues are solved: on the one hand, there is no need to add guard bands because the others UFMC
symbols will not be disturbed by the side lobes interferences. On the other hand, UFMC is more robust to intercarrier interferences and a loss of orthogonality can not be a problem.

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Figure 6: PSD before channel

The Power spectral density figure shows that the power is highly reduced when the frequency is not in the reserved band for
UFMC.
Thanks to the convolution filtering, cyclic prefixes are no more needed. The order of the filters is quite the same relative to
OFDM one, but shorter than in FBMC waveform.
However, the main disadvantage is about the long time computation due to the considerable size of the matrices. Thus, the
main issue to solve this problem is to find the best features to UFMC algorithm: number of subcarriers, number of IDFT
points, length of the filter, in order to be performant either the algorithm must not be to complex.

Figure 7: BER against SNR for UFMC waveform

GFDM
Transmitter

GFDM is a generalized case of OFDM: instead of transmitting one symbol per subcarrier, GFDM modulation introduces
the notion of sub symbols . Thus, each of K subcarriers transmits M sub symbols by GFDM packet. The vector s that
brings together all the symbols is written:
!
= C! , , G;(

%G(

Furthermore, each symbol is composed of M sub symbols; therefore, the kth symbol can be written:

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B = B,C , , B,%;(

!
%(

NB:
1. The mth sub symbol of the kth subcarrier is noted : B,I .
2. The succession of symbols is transmitted with a rate of Ts whereas the sub symbols are transmitted at Tsp = K*Ts.
GFDM transmitter consists in several steps:

The different symbols are up-sampled at the rate ML-1, with L the number of samples used to describe a time slot.
Then, the latter are circularly convolved by the shaping filter g(n) of length ML.
After that, the signal is modulated by the corresponding subcarrier frequency.
All the obtained components are summed in order to give the transmitted signal, written as follows:
G;( %;(

B,I 1
B:C I:C

Finally, a cyclic prefix is added to prevent interference between GFDM packets.

Receiver
After the signal has been broadcasted through the channel, with impulse response (), the operations of the GFDM
receiver are the reversed ones of the transmitter. Indeed, the following stages are listed below:
Firstly, the cyclic prefix is removed and during the same period, the received signal is used for synchronisation and
estimation of the channel impulse response.
Subsequently, an equalizer is used to compensate the channel effects.
The equalized sequence is submitted to a detector: Matched Filter (MF); Zero Forcing (ZF) or Minimum Mean
Square Error (MMSE). It includes the steps of modulation by the frequency of each subcarriers and the convolution
with the adapted filter.
Consequently, a bloc of decision uses the recovered symbols to estimate the data bits.

Tail-Biting
The key of the GFDM modulation lies in the circularly convolution: indeed, each sub symbol is filtered by a shifted version
of the shaping filter (). More precisely, the last samples of filter are shifted on the first positions of filter I .
This kind of convolution is called Tail-Biting:
it keeps the symbol compact in time;
it enables filtering in frequency domain and FFT processing;
it allows for a cyclic prefix to be added.
Conclusion & results
GFDM is a flexible multi-carrier transmission technique which bears many similarities to OFDM. The main difference is
that the carriers are not orthogonal to each other. GFDM provides better control of the out-of-band emissions and the reduces
the peak to average power ratio, PAPR. Both of these issues are the major drawbacks of OFDM technology.
Moreover, it could be said that the implantation of this waveform on MATLAB is satisfying: indeed, in term of BER the
GFDM graph fits the theoretical one. Nevertheless, this result has been found considering an AWGN channel, meaning that
the channel impulse response is a dirac: to go further on this waveform, a more complex channel is needed and equalizer
issues are at stake.
Finally, the following figure shows the power spectral density of the GFDM transmitted signal: compared to OFDM, it
could be said that the side lobes are reduced, which enables to decrease symbols interference.

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Figure 9: BER against SNR for GFDM waveform

Figure 8: PSD before channel

MC-FTN
Faster-Than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling is a method of improving bandwidth efficiency of conventional orthogonal
modulation schemes. The Multicarrier Faster-Than-Nyquist (MC-FTN) is the application of the FTN to the multicarrier System.
The MC-FTN consists in compressing the signal to be transmitted as well as in time as in frequency. Therefore,
compression factors t f in time and in frequency are successively introduced. Moreover, the spectral efficiency is propor(
tional to
. These factors are smaller than 1. The aim of the MC-FTN is to apply the smallest product t f that allows to
Z[ \[
decode the transmitted signal at the receiver without any errors. As a consequence, interferences between symbols are introduced.

Figure 10: FTN principle

Let us consider the signal to be transmitted. The smaller are the compression factors the smaller is its power spectral
densitys bandwidth. But its PAPR is the same whatever the values of t f. The figure below represents the Power Spectral
Density (PSD) of the signal: it can be seen that with a product t f = 0.5 the PSDs bandwidth is divided by 2. Consequently,
it represents a gain of spectral efficiency.

MC-FTN is very efficient for reducing the spectral bandwidth. Nevertheless, such a reduction is useless, unless the receiver decodes the right symbols. So an equalizer-step is required but adds a large complexity in the system. It is the major
disadvantage of MC-FTN. In the figure below the BER is represented against the SNR values.

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Figure 12: BER against SNR with turbocode

Figure 11: PSD for two fdelta*tdelta values

Comparison

Figure 13: Complementary Commutative Distributive Function (CCFD)/PAPR for each waveform

Table 1: Comparison of each waveform

Conclusion
To conclude, the study and the implementation of each waveform, enabled to have first comparison points. Indeed, the
waveforms show better performances than OFDM in term of PAPR, spectral efficiency or inter-symbol interference protection. Hitherto, the results were found without introducing any channel, they have just confirmed the theoretical ones. Besides
OFDM, no realistic simulation was conducted. To achieve this issue, channel equalization must be added.

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