FBMC-based air interface for 5G mobile: Challenges and proposed solutions

Scenarios envisaged for mobile communication systems beyond 2020 imply that future applications and services will impose highly diverse requirements on the system design. To appropriately respond to these requirements while ensuring an efficient usage of available spectrum and system resources, the air interface of 5G system is expected to provide much more flexibility compared to today´s systems. Filterbank based multi-carrier (FBMC) may be considered a potential enabler for that purpose, as it provides excellent waveform properties with additional degrees of freedom for the system design, thanks to the use of prototype filters that may be adjusted to meet desired system constraints. This paper elaborates on the challenges that still need to be solved to render FBMC an eligible candidate as fundamental technology for 5G mobile radio and presents some first approaches towards practical solutions.