Influence of pulse shaping on bit error rate performance and out of band radiation of Generalized Frequency Division Multiplexing

Generalized Frequency Division Multiplexing (GFDM) is a multicarrier transmission scheme that offers flexible pulse shaping of individual subcarriers. The application of pulse shaping per subcarrier can control the out of band (OOB) radiation and create non-orthogonal waveforms. In this paper, the influence of the pulse shaping to the overall system performance, namely bit error rate (BER) over AWGN channels and OOB radiation, is investigated. Closed from expressions for the BER and power spectral density (PSD) of GFDM are derived. Simulation results show that GFDM reduces the OOB radiation by 46dB compared to OFDM, while at the same time, the OFDM BER can be achieved when using the Dirichlet pulse filter. In case some self-interference is allowed, the OOB radiation can be reduced even more, which is a key aspect for cognitive radio (CR) applications.