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GFDM performance in terms of BER, PAPR and OOB and comparison to OFDM system
AIP Conference Proceedings 1715, 020039 (2016); https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4942721
© 2017 Author(s).
The Potential of FBMC over OFDM for the Future 5G
Mobile Communication Technology
A.N. Ibrahim1,a, M.F.L. Abdullah2,b
Faculty of Electrical and Electronics Engineering,
Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia.
Abstract. Fifth Generation (5G) is the new evolution of mobile communication technology and will be launched soon in
many countries. The researchers and designers of mobile communication technology have been facing the increasing demand
of the mobile consumers, high data rates and mobility requirements needed by new wireless applications. Most of the
countries have started research on 5G mobile communication technology that is predictable to be launched on 2020 in
conjunction with the Olympic Games in Tokyo. Filterbank Multicarrier (FBMC) is one of the modulation techniques for the
future 5G mobile communication technology. It uses the multicarrier techniques that are immune to fading caused by
transmission of more than one path at a time and also immune to intersymbol interference besides able to function effectively
compared to Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) which is used in Fourth Generation (4G) mobile
communications technology. This paper discusses the performance of FBMC over OFDM based on the previous journals
that were investigated by researchers.
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Fourth Generation (4G) introduced in 2000s. 4G uses the concept of connectivity anywhere, anytime from any
kind of devices and it is indeed observed in user behavior [5]. It supposed to provide 100Mbps to 1Gbps to users [6]
and the range of latency between 40ms and 60ms. 4G able to delivering faster and better mobile broadband experiences
besides application of mobile web access and the high quality of videos and images. Besides that, 4G LTE were
introduced because it is not able to fully reach the range of 4G. The download process, stream and browse faster with
better connectivity. It is closer to meet the criteria of standards. Next, LTE-Advanced was introduced which is more
progressive of technologies and standards which is capable to deliver faster and bigger data. Besides that, it offers to
deliver true speeds of 4G compared to the LTE networks. 4G comprised Long Term Evolution (LTE), Worldwide
Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) smart antenna
technologies, Mobile Broadband Wireless Access (MBWA) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing
(OFDM). Nowadays, there are more powerful laptops and smartphones which is becoming more attractive and
demanding advanced multimedia capabilities. This has led to an eruption of wireless mobile devices and services.
Table 1 shows the evolution of first generation to fourth generation of mobile communications technology.
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5G mobile communication technology attracted worldwide research attention in the recent years with the vision to
have 100 billion connections, close to zero latency which is low latency and 1000 times throughput enhancement. 5G
is high reliability and throughput, increase scalability an energy efficient and low latency [9]. To achieve the
requirements, it needs to figure out the physical layer of the modulation and coding up to all the routing schemes and
network topology [10]. Figure 2 shows the requirements of future 5G mobile communication technology. This
technology will be introduced beyond 2020 and expected to support a new frequency bands with the wider spectral
bandwidth per frequency channel.
The predecessor of this technologies have proved substantial increase in peak bit rate and rather 5G is also
advanced in connectivity concurrently and instantaneously, high capacity to allow more devices, larger data volume
per unit area, higher reliability of the communication and lower battery consumptions. 5G technology includes all
types of advanced technology which make this system becomes powerful in massive demand besides provides the
mobile phone consumers more efficiency and features. 5G is a packet switched wireless system with expanded area
coverage and high throughput.
This technology will be used millimeter wireless and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) that enables speed
higher than 1Gbps at low mobility and greater than 100Mbps at full mobility. 5G technology offered high resolution
for extreme mobile consumers, higher data rates, bidirectional huge bandwidth and the finest Quality of Service (QoS).
5G technology will be supported the connections for at least 100 billion devices with low latency and 10Gbps
throughput. Figure 3 shows the research directions in future 5G mobile communication technology.
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FIGURE 4. Frequency response for OFDM [13]
FBMC systems are a subclass of Multicarrier (MC) systems. FBMC modulation is a multicarrier modulation
method in which a set of synthesis and analysis filters are employed at the transmitter and receiver respectively [17,18].
The filters uses in the FBMC systems are a set of bandpass filters. In this filter, the frequency shifted or modulated
versions of a prototype lowpass filter. FBMC offers a better spectral containment than OFDM as the filter bandwidth,
so the selectivity is a parameter that can be assorted during lowpass prototype design [19,20]. Besides that, FBMC
gives the better bandwidth efficiency compared to OFDM. This is because, FBMC does not use the CP extension, so
it will be attenuated the interferences within and close to the used frequency band efficiently. Next, the FBMC systems
are comparatively more resistant to narrowband noise effects [20].
Figure 6 shows the graphical illustration of the FBMC transmitter meanwhile Fig. 7 shows the graphical illustration
of a generic FBMC receiver. At the transmitter as shown in Fig. 6, the high speed input signal will be demultiplexed
into N branches. After that, it will be modulated by the different or same signal constellation as required. The
subsequent modulated branches are the upsampled to give N copies. The upsampled data will be sent through the set
of synthesis filters gk(n),k=0,1,….,N-1. Next, to produce the transmitted signal s(n), the output of all filters will be
summed together. At the receiver as shown in Fig. 7, to give N subcarriers of different center frequencies, the received
signal r(n) will be passed through to the bank of analysis filters fk(n),k=0,1,….,N-1. The signal in every branch will
be downsampled by N, demodulated and multiplexed to produce the estimate of the original signal Xr(n) [21].
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FIGURE 6. The graphical illustration of the FBMC transmitter
MULTICARRIER MODULATION
The multicarrier modulation was considered as an effective way to attain high data rate transmission. This is
because the total channel bandwidth was divided into sub-channels with subcarriers will be modulated with a lower
data rate. The OFDM system band modulation is a special case of multicarrier transmission. The original data streams
at lower data rates will be modulated separately in this system. Conventional modulation schemes are Quadrature
Amplitude Modulation (QAM) of Phase Shift Keying (PSK). To achieve high speed data transmission, these lower
data streams will be transmitted simultaneously through the subcarriers after modulation [22].
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TABLE 2. Form of QAM used in digital radio communications
CONSTELLATION DIAGRAM
QAM
OFDM
5G
Based on Fig. 8, the inverse fast fourier transform (IFFT) and the input of the Cyclic Prefix (CPin) was replaced
by the synthesis filterbank (SFB). Meanwhile for the output of the Cyclic Prefix (CPout) and fast fourier transform
(FFT) was replaced by the analysis filterbank (AFB) [12]. The frequency spectrums of the subcarriers in the OFDM
system are overlapped with the minimum frequency spacing. Besides that, the orthogonality was reached between the
different of the subcarriers [24]. The input stream was split into parallel data streams using the serial to parallel data
converter (S/P). Subsequently, to generate time sequence of the streams, it will be passed into an IFFT block. The
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symbol time sequences of the OFDM system will be extended by adding CP. The digital signal produced and converted
into analog form before it has been transmitted over the channel [24]. FBMC overcomes the weakness of the OFDM
system. In the FBMC system, it produced a well localized subchannel in both frequency and time domain by adding
a generalized pulse shaping filters [24].
There is no CP needed in the FBMC system, so it provided more effective use of the radio resources and have
more spectral containment signals. Filterbank can be defined as an array of the N filters that will be processed the N
input signals to generate N outputs. There are two types of the filterbank in this system which is analysis filterbank
(AFB) and synthesis filterbank (SFB). In the AFB, the input of N filter is connected together. Besides that, the system
in analogous manner that can be assumed as an analyzer to the input signal based on each filter characteristics.
Meanwhile in the SFB, the outputs of the filter array will be added and a new signal will be synthesized [15]. The
synthesized analysis configuration known as transmultiplexer and will be applied in the multicarrier communication
systems. Figure 9 shows the frequency response for OFDM and FBMC. Based on this figure, it shows the major
impact to the transmission data. The energy was concentrated within the frequency range of a single subcarrier for the
FBMC systems, meanwhile in the OFDM system shows the rather strong sidelobes due to rectangular windowing
[23].
In the OFDM system, CP extension required, so it reduces the bandwidth efficiency, but in the FBMC system, CP
are not required and hence conserves the bandwidth. Besides that, OFDM is very sensitive to the carrier frequency
offset (CFO). Meanwhile for the FBMC system, it is less sensitive, so it performs significantly with the increase of
the consumer mobile network.
Based on simulation run via network simulator, according to Bidayalaxmi et al [24], on their journal, OFDM
showing strong sidelobes due to its rectangular windowing compared to FBMC. Besides that, comparison in term of
bit error rate (BER), signal to noise ratio (SNR), packet delivery ratio and dropped packets is investigated. From the
data obtained by Bidayalaxmi et al [24], it shows that the FBMC system improves in performance compared to OFDM
as shown in Fig. 10 and Table 3. The researchers state that FBMC is an ideal modulation technique for future
development in wireless communications compared to the OFDM [24].
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FIGURE 10. Comparison of (a) BER, (b) SNR, (c) Packet Delivery Ratio, (d) Dropped Packets [24]
TABLE 3. Summary on comparison of OFDM and FBMC for SNR, BER, packet delivery ratio and dropped packets [24]
OFDM FBMC
SNR (dB) Between 0 to 11 (for increasing Between 0 to 14 (for increasing
number of nodes) number of nodes)
BER Between 1.15 to 0.75 (for increasing Between 0.95 to 0.65 (for increasing
number of nodes) number of nodes)
Packet delivery ratio Increasing from 0 to 0.8 (for Increasing from 0 to 1 (for
increasing number of nodes) increasing number of nodes)
Dropped packets Fluctuated between 0 to 14 (for Fluctuated between 0 to 2 (for
increasing number of nodes) increasing number of nodes)
According to Hanen et al [25], the investigation used two multicarrier which is the classical OFDM and FBMC.
Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh channels are used as the channel medium. From the
simulation, it shows in terms of BER, the FBMC system is more sensitive to phase distortions when no correction
applied at the receiver as shown in Fig. 11. Besides that, the FBMC and OFDM system has almost the same
performance for the BER. This explained both of the FBMC and OFDM systems present the differences between the
probability distribution of the intrinsic interference [25].
FIGURE 11. (a) Comparison OFDM and FBMC, 4QAM, 64 subcarriers, Saleh’s HPA model, AWGN channel, (b) BER
performance of FBMC, 4QAM, 64subcarriers, Saleh’s HPA model, Rayleigh channel [25]
On the other hand, Qinwei et al [26] investigated the comparison and evaluation between FBMC and OFDM
systems in term of BER using two schemes which is under AWGN channel and Rayleigh channel. The result of FBMC
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and OFDM under AWGN channel gives the same performance meanwhile for the Rayleigh channel, both of the
system shows the different results. Figure 12 shows the result of FBMC system, OFDM system and OFDM without
CP extension under Rayleigh channel. Based on the figure, it shows that a very long time domain equalizer is necessary
in order to achieve the theoretical BER performance of the FBMC system. Meanwhile, for the OFDM system, the
simulation result and the analytical BER are matching ideally. Next, the OFDM system without CP extension shows
that it has a very poor performance. However, the implementation of the CP in the OFDM system will decrease the
efficiency of the bandwidth [26]. Table 4 shows the advantages and disadvantages of OFDM and FBMC.
FIGURE 12. (a) FBMC in Rayleigh channel, (b) OFDM in Rayleigh channel, (c) OFDM without CP in Rayleigh channel [26]
CONCLUSION
The biggest thing that will happen in the mobile communication industry is the advent of 5G mobile
communication technology which is on track for launch in 2020 in conjunction with the Olympic Games in Tokyo.
5G mobile communications is the next step in the transformation communication technology. The competence of 5G
mobile communication must broaden far beyond those of previous generations to facilitate connectivity for a wide
range of applications. These capabilities consist of very low latency, ultra-high reliability and very high achievable
data rates. Besides that, the consumers will be able to download a 1080p HD movie to their mobile phone in about
one second and also 50GB video games within a minute with this 5G mobile communication technology. FBMC is a
new waveform technique having few advantages over OFDM for future 5G mobile communication technology and
the fundamental change of this technology is the replacement of the OFDM with a multicarrier system based on
filterbank at the receiver and transmitter. Besides that, the CP extension required and therefore reduces bandwidth
efficiency in OFDM. OFDM is very sensitive to the carrier frequency offset meanwhile in FBMC is less sensitive so
it performs better with the increase of the mobile consumers.
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