Waveform contenders for 5G - OFDM vs. FBMC vs.
UFMC
Frank Schaich, Thorsten Wild
Bell Laboratories, Wireless Access, Alcatel-Lucent, Stuttgart, Germany,
{Frank.Schaich;Thorsten.Wild}@alcatel-lucent.com
ABSTRACT
In this paper we review the waveform design of 4G (based
on OFDM) and motivate the need for a redesign for 5G.
Both the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the
move to user-centric processing are rendering OFDM
unfeasible. With FBMC a potential contender has been
promoted in recent years. Though FBMC is better suited
than OFDM in theory, practical considerations pinpoint
many issues of FBMC. Therefore, we have designed a new
waveform called Universal Filtered Multi-Carrier (UFMC)
collecting the advantages FBMC is promising while
avoiding its drawbacks. In contrast to FBMC, UFMC
applies a filtering functionality per sub-band instead of per
subcarrier.
Index Terms— OFDM, FBMC, SMT, FMT, UFMC,
4G, 5G, multicarrier
1. INTRODUCTION
OFDM is a well-known, thoroughly studied and heavily
applied waveform design principle. Just to name two, both
4G (LTE and its evolutions so far) and IEEE 802.11 (WiFi)
use OFDM as basic signal format for carrying the data via
the air. While having many nice aspects, OFDM has a
fundamental characteristic making it less attractive for the
cellular communication system to come (often referred to
5G). Each single subcarrier in an OFDM system is shaped
using a rectangular window in time domain leading to sinc-
shaped subcarriers in frequency domain (applying windows
with smooth transitions at both improves on this, however,
introducing intercarrier interference). So, one of the most
celebrated characteristic of OFDM (dividing the spectrum
into multiple parallel orthogonal sub-bands with highest
possible efficiency) applies only in case of perfect
circumstances. Those circumstances are for example perfect
frequency synchronization and tight time alignment within
the duration of the cyclic prefix. LTE is able to achieve this
by applying a closed loop ranging mechanism and
demanding very strict oscillator requirements. The single
devices are not allowed to transmit data as long as the base
station is not satisfied with respect to the time and frequency
alignment of their transmissions. For doing so energy costly
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message exchange is required, including a random access
procedure. Two foreseen trends related with future mobile
communication systems are contradicting here:
x The potential support of the so-called Internet of
Things (IoT)
x The move from cell-centric to user-centric
processing
The IoT extends the internet as we know it today by
attaching a multitude of sensors/actors (e.g. power meters)
to it wirelessly (e.g. via 5G). It is yet too early to fully
survey all possible use cases of the IoT, however, many of
them will rely on devices differing heavily from the ones
attaching to 4G (e.g. smart phones). While it is annoying
having to attach a smart phone once every second day to the
electric grid, such a requirement would kill most of the
imaginable business cases for the IoT. Instead, devices
attaching sensor/actor to the network need to run 10-15
years without requiring a battery exchange and are to be
much cheaper than personal devices run by humans. So, a
system incorporating IoT devices may not be able to apply
as tight synchronization requirements as 4G does due to
energy and cost reasons. In lieu thereof it is preferable to
allow the IoT devices to transmit their messages being
loosely synchronized relying on open-loop mechanisms (e.g.
making use of downlink synchronization signals) and to use
cheaper components (e.g. oscillators with relaxed
requirements).
In 4G, devices are connected to the network in a cell-centric
manner. Many protocols and procedures covering the lower
part of the layer stack (PHY, MAC) of communications, like
time/frequency synchronization and control signaling are
linked to the cell the device is attached to. So, the base
station setting up the cell is nowadays the network element
which can be seen as the “center of gravity” with respect to
the access stratum. With the new concept of user-centric
processing the very basic concept of cells is dropped [1].
Many aspects of wireless communications such as CoMP,
mobility management and offloading may highly benefit
from such a move. One key aspect of user-centric
processing is for devices to be connected to multiple access
points typically. Naturally, the distances between the device
and all access points it is attached to are diverging and their
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respective carrier frequencies may differ to some extend (in
fractions of the subcarrier width), too. So a similarly tight
synchronization, as required in LTE appears not to be cost-
effective or even possible for a user-centric future system.
Concluding, it is obvious that the air interface of 5G very
likely needs to be better suited to a lower degree of
synchronization as demanded by OFDM, as OFDM suffers
from strong intercarrier interference in this case. Therefore,
in recent years an alternative to OFDM has been heavily
promoted: Filterbank based multicarrier (FBMC) [2,3].
While relying on dividing the spectrum into multiple
orthogonal sub-bands, too, FBMC applies a filtering
functionality to each of the subcarriers in contrast to OFDM.
So, with FBMC the side-lobes are much weaker and thus the
intercarrier interference issue described above is by far less
crucial than with OFDM. Therefore, a system applying
FBMC is much more suited to a potential 5G system to that
respect. While in theory, FBMC has many nice features,
practical system configurations renders most of them
unused. For example, staggered multi-tone (SMT) – a
variant of FBMC - achieves a time-frequency efficiency of 1
(for comparison: OFDM as applied in LTE achieves a time-
frequency efficiency of around 0.84) but only in case of
infinite block lengths.
Therefore, we have decided to design a novel multicarrier
signal format named Universal Filtered Multi-Carrier
(UFMC) [4,5], collecting the advantages of FBMC while
avoiding its disadvantages.
The paper is structured as follows: section 2 gives a brief
review on the principles of FBMC and specifies the signal
characteristics we assume to be problematic for 5G. Then
of influence depends on the parameters of the modulator e.g.
the overlapping factor). Thanks to the use of offset-QAM
the interference is easily cancelled at the receiver by
ignoring the part of the received symbol not carrying the
data.
As already mentioned FBMC applies a filtering
functionality on a per subcarrier basis. So, the frequency
response of the filter needs to be rather tight, requiring very
long filter lengths (relative to the length of a single symbol).
Typically filter lengths of three or four times the symbol
length are used. So, long ramp up and ramp down areas are
required in case of bursty data transmission.
Both the fact that subcarriers are spilling interference into
its neighbor subcarriers and the need for very long filters
causes various issues especially if practical system aspects
are applied. The next section briefly describes those issues
and available means to overcome them.
2.2. Disadvantageous signal properties
A very basic issue arising from the fact of subcarriers
spilling interference to its neighbors is associated with
channel estimation:
Assuming a real pilot p, the actual symbol being
transmitted on subcarrier i in symbol j (for simplicity we
omit the index i,j in the following) is as follows:
P p  jI
I is interference depending on the data surrounding the
pilot subcarrier. So, after passing the channel H the received
symbol is as follows:
section 3 gives a more detailed description of UFMC and
highlights the design choices we made making UFMC a
better fit to 5G than FBMC. Finally we conclude the paper.
2. FBMC
2.1. Basic principles
Regarding the very basic principles two variants of
FBMC are existing – filtered multi-tone (FMT) and
staggered multi-tone (SMT) [2]. SMT exhibits higher
spectral efficiency and is more heavily promoted (e.g. [3,6])
than FMT and thus we concentrate on SMT in the
following.
To achieve a time-frequency efficiency of 1 SMT needs
to stagger the multi-carrier symbols in time and has to apply
offset-QAM (OQAM). So, in case of complex symbols to be
transported (QPSK, xQAM) the transmitter splits the
symbols into real and imaginary part and modulates them on
consecutive symbols. By doing so a chessboard like
structure is achieved with real and imaginary symbols
alternating both in time and frequency direction. Different to
systems applying OFDM, SMT is not orthogonal with
respect to the complex plain. Each subcarrier introduces
interference to the subcarriers in its neighborhood (the area
R HP H  p  jI 
The estimated channel is:
~ R § I· I
H H ¨¨1  j ¸¸ H  jH
p © p¹ p
As the baseband representation H of the wireless channel
typically is complex, there is no way to separate the estimate
as easily as it is possible with the data.
Luckily, very good means to overcome this issue do exit.
The so-called auxiliary pilot principle accompanies each
pilot with another precalculated symbol cancelling the
interference originating from adjacent data symbols.
Naturally, the auxiliary pilots require some energy reducing
the available energy for the main pilot. So, channel
estimation is degraded accordingly compared to a system
not requiring offset-QAM, if the two systems are to be
compared in a fair manner.
With multiple users sharing the channel (e.g. the multiple
access channel, e.g. the shared uplink data channel of LTE –
PUSCH, and the DL broadcast channel, if complex per user
precoding is applied) user transmissions are interfering with
each other at the frequency edges of the bursts as the various
links between the users and the base station are confronted
with different complex channel phases. This destroys the
orthogonality imprinted by the use of OQAM symbols. To

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deal with this either complex multi-user receivers or
capacity reducing guards have to be applied.
Any scheme relying on complex symbols are suffering
due to the inherent interference. For example the use of
complex pilot sequences for intercell-interference
suppression as applied in LTE is not applicable.
Additionally, the use of complex preambles at the beginning
of a user burst is handicapped accordingly. Means to
overcome this are for example the use of guards in the
vicinity of the respective subcarriers, however, reducing the
time-frequency efficiency accordingly. Finally, precoding
with complex weights is troublesome, either, due to the
inherent interference.
As already outlined SMT applies filters with rather long
impulse responses. The resulting ramps at the edges of each
user burst cover multiple symbol lengths. With the advent of
the IoT use cases will be present requiring the transport of
very small packets and/or the guarantee of very low
latencies. Both require very short burst lengths (transmission
time intervals) rendering the overhead of multiple symbol
lengths very painful [7]. Means to reduce the overhead are
given in [8]: The so-called burst truncation applies a
windowing functionality shortening filter ramps. However,
the cost to pay is increased out-of-band radiation and
intercarrier interference. Another option to overcome this
issue is to significantly increase the width of the subcarriers
decreasing the length of the single multi-carrier symbols and
increasing the number of symbols carrying the data
accordingly. Unfortunately, again a cost is to be paid: The
channel responses may not be flat anymore within the range
of a single subcarrier, making channel equalization much
more complex.
So, the application of SMT as modulation format exhibits
many issues arising with applying practical system settings.
Though there are many clever approaches available to
improve on this, there typically is a price to pay attached to
it. Therefore we have taken one step back and designed an
alternative modulation format making use of multiple
carriers and filtering functionalities. The target has been to
collect the gains FBMC is promising while avoiding the
disadvantages. The next section briefly introduces UFMC.
3. UFMC
While FBMC performs a per-subcarrier filtering, filtered
OFDM applies a filtering operation for the entire frequency
band. The new UFMC solution shown in Figure 1 is a
generalization of filtered OFDM and FMT [4,5,7,9,10].
The time-domain transmit vector for a particular multi-
carrier symbol of user k is the superposition of the sub-band-
wise filtered components, with filter length L and FFT
length N:
B
x k ¦ F ik
V s ik ik
> ( N  L 1 )u1 @ i 1 > ( N  L 1 )u N @ > N uni @ > ni u1 @
For each of the B subbands, indexed i, the ni complex QAM
symbols are transformed to time-domain by the IDFT-
matrix Vi. Vi includes the relevant columns of the inverse
Fourier matrix according to the respective sub-band position

Figure 1: UFMC transceiver architecture

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within the overall available frequency range. Fi is a Toeplitz
matrix, composed of the filter impulse response, performing
the linear convolution. Note that there is no time overlap
between subsequent UFMC symbols. The symbol duration
of N+L-1 samples is generated by the filter length and the
FFT size.
The block-wise filtering brings in additional flexibility and
may be used to avoid the main FBMC drawbacks. The
filtering per block of subcarriers (e.g. “physical resource
block” - PRB - or “sub-band” in the LTE terminology)
results in filters which are spectrally broader in pass-band
than FBMC and thus shorter in time. This shortened time
can be used to bring down the filter length e.g. in the order
of the OFDM cyclic prefix (CP). Short bursts will be
supported well with that [10], as well as operation in
fragmented bands. The side-lobe suppression now works
inbetween resource blocks, instead of inbetween subcarriers.
UFMC is orthogonal with respect to the complex plain.
Thus, complex modulation symbols may be used and any
issue described above related to this are not existing.
The filter ramp-up and ramp-down in time domain provides
a symbol shape which has inherent soft protection against
inter-symbol interference (ISI), as well as robustness for
supporting multiple access users which are not perfectly
time-aligned,
Due to the possibility to reduce guard bands, and to avoid
using a CP which is discarded later on in the receiver,
UFMC is spectrally more efficient than OFDM. The
receiver processing can still be frequency-domain (FD)
FFT-based: The receive time window gets zeros appended
to the next power of two, an FFT is carried out where each
second frequency value corresponds to a subcarrier main
lobe. Similar to OFDM, single-tap per-subcarrier frequency
domain equalizers can be used which equalize the joint
impact of the radio channel and the respective subband-
filter. This leads to similar complexity order as OFDM.
Potentially before the conversion to frequency domain some
time domain preprocessing may be applied (e.g. windowing
for interference suppression).
UFMC can be even used with different subcarrier spacings
or filter times for users in different subbands. E.g. user 1
uses a particular FFT size N1 and filter length L1, user 2 uses
N2 and L2 and the UFMC symbol durations might be
designed identically, thus N1+L1-1= N2+L2-1. This allows
UFMC to be a highly adaptive modulation scheme, which
can be easily tailored to many different aspects of
communications such as delay/Doppler spread
characteristics of the radio channel and user needs.
The superiority of UFMC against OFDM in case of UL
CoMP (joint reception) has been shown in [9].
4. CONCLUSION
Many arising aspects of mobile communications (e.g.
support of Internet of Things, user-centric processing) are
asking for a fundamental redesign of the physical layer.
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While FBMC is a step in the right direction it is still not
optimal as many issues are arising when applying practical
system settings. Though there are many proposals for
dealing with these issues treating the symptoms instead of
dealing with the cause, there is always a costly price to pay.
So, we have rethought the paradigm of filtered multicarrier
and designed UFMC. With UFMC we are able to collect the
gains FBMC is promising while avoiding the drawbacks.
Like FBMC, UFMC is more robust to multi-user
interference, exhibits higher spectral efficiency, has superior
performance in case of coordinated multipoint transmission
and is better suited to fragmented spectrum than OFDM.
UFMC improves at short burst/low latency transmission
scenarios compared to FBMC and is able to provide
complex orthogonality avoiding many traps.
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