Cyclic Block FMT modulation for communications in time-variant frequency selective fading channels

We present a novel multi-carrier modulation scheme for communications over wireless fading channels. The scheme is based on the filter bank modulation concept, it offers sub-channel frequency confinement and it enjoys an efficient frequency domain implementation. Differently from more conventional filter bank approaches, this scheme uses circular convolutions instead of linear convolutions in the filtering operations. We refer to this scheme as Cyclic Block Filtered Multitone (CB-FMT) modulation. We study the performance of CB-FMT when transmission is over frequency selective time-variant fading channels both in terms of signal-to- interference power ratio (SIR) and in terms of achievable rate. A simple adaptive frequency domain equalizer is proposed. The comparison with the conventional OFDM scheme shows that CB-FMT can enjoy superior SIR and achievable rate performance yet requiring similar complexity.