Circularly Pulse-Shaped Waveforms for 5G: Options and Comparisons

Generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM) and circular filter bank multicarrier (C-FBMC) are two contender waveforms with circular pulse-shaping that are recently proposed for the physical layer of the fifth generation of wireless communication networks (5G). This paper puts these waveforms under the microscope and conducts an analysis on their practical feasibility and performance. In addition, we present a transmitter structure for both GFDM and C-FBMC and show that this structure has the same complexity for both systems. In this paper, GFDM receiver with successive interference cancellation (SIC) is considered as it can get a performance close to that of OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing). Our bit error rate (BER) performance analysis reveals that GFDM has limitations in terms of the total number of symbols per data packet. When the number of symbols in a packet has an even value, GFDM suffers from a high error floor in BER. For the small constellation sizes, GFDM and C-FBMC reach the same BER performance as that of OFDM. As the constellation size increases, a gap between the BER curve of GFDM and OFDM starts to appear while C-FBMC keeps the same performance as OFDM. Finally, our computational complexity analysis reveals that C-FBMC receiver is simpler than GFDM.