Pilot-Aided Channel Estimation for Universal Filtered Multi-Carrier

Universal Filtered Multi-Carrier (UFMC, a.k.a. UF-OFDM) is a novel multi-carrier modulation technique, which aims at replacing OFDM for next generation wireless communication systems (5G). It is a generalization of OFDM and filter bank based multi-carrier (FBMC-FMT), which combines the advantages of OFDM and FBMC while avoiding its main drawbacks. UFMC is shown to be more robust in relaxed synchronization conditions i.e. time-frequency misalignment compared to conventional CP-OFDM systems. As required in potential scenarios of 5G systems, UFMC is more efficient to support short uplink bursts communications. Without the insertion of cyclic prefix, we investigate the procedure and performance of pilot-aided channel estimation for UFMC in an uplink multi-user FDMA scenario and show that almost the same performance as CP-OFDM can be achieved despite the lack of cyclic prefix. In case of timing and frequency offset, UFMC shows its robustness over CP-OFDM in terms of symbol error rate (SER). Simulation results show that the error floor is reduced applying UFMC for considered different types of channels.