Waveform Design for 5G and Beyond

5G is envisioned to improve major key performance indicators (KPIs), such as peak data rate, spectral efficiency, power consumption, complexity, connection density, latency, and mobility. This chapter aims to provide a complete picture of the ongoing 5G waveform discussions and overviews the major candidates. It provides a brief description of the waveform and reveals the 5G use cases and waveform design requirements. The chapter presents the main features of cyclic prefix-orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (CP-OFDM) that is deployed in 4G LTE systems. CP-OFDM is the baseline of the 5G waveform discussions since the performance of a new waveform is usually compared with it. The chapter examines the essential characteristics of the major waveform candidates along with the related advantages and disadvantages. It summarizes and compares the key features of different waveforms.Comment: 22 pages, 21 figures, 2 tables; accepted version (The URL for the final version: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781119333142.ch2

On Time-Variant Distortions in Multicarrier Transmission with Application to Frequency Offsets and Phase Noise

Phase noise and frequency offsets are due to their time-variant behavior one of the most limiting disturbances in practical OFDM designs and therefore intensively studied by many authors. In this paper we present a generalized framework for the prediction of uncoded system performance in the presence of time-variant distortions including the transmitter and receiver pulse shapes as well as the channel. Therefore, unlike existing studies, our approach can be employed for more general multicarrier schemes. To show the usefulness of our approach, we apply the results to OFDM in the context of frequency offset and Wiener phase noise, yielding improved bounds on the uncoded performance. In particular, we obtain exact formulas for the averaged performance in AWGN and time-invariant multipath channels.Comment: 10 pages (twocolumn), 5 figure

Scattered Pilots and Virtual Carriers Based Frequency Offset Tracking for OFDM Systems: Algorithms, Identifiability, and Performance Analysis

In this paper, we propose a novel carrier frequency offset (CFO) tracking algorithm for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems by exploiting scattered pilot carriers and virtual carriers embedded in the existing OFDM standards. Assuming that the channel remains constant during two consecutive OFDM blocks and perfect timing, a CFO tracking algorithm is proposed using the limited number of pilot carriers in each OFDM block. Identifiability of this pilot based algorithm is fully discussed under the noise free environment, and a constellation rotation strategy is proposed to eliminate the c-ambiguity for arbitrary constellations. A weighted algorithm is then proposed by considering both scattered pilots and virtual carriers. We find that, the pilots increase the performance accuracy of the algorithm, while the virtual carriers reduce the chance of CFO outlier. Therefore, the proposed tracking algorithm is able to achieve full range CFO estimation, can be used before channel estimation, and could provide improved performance compared to existing algorithms. The asymptotic mean square error (MSE) of the proposed algorithm is derived and simulation results agree with the theoretical analysis

Design and Validation of a Software Defined Radio Testbed for DVB-T Transmission

This paper describes the design and validation of a Software Defined Radio (SDR) testbed, which can be used for Digital Television transmission using the Digital Video Broadcasting - Terrestrial (DVB-T) standard. In order to generate a DVB-T-compliant signal with low computational complexity, we design an SDR architecture that uses the C/C++ language and exploits multithreading and vectorized instructions. Then, we transmit the generated DVB-T signal in real time, using a common PC equipped with multicore central processing units (CPUs) and a commercially available SDR modem board. The proposed SDR architecture has been validated using fixed TV sets, and portable receivers. Our results show that the proposed SDR architecture for DVB-T transmission is a low-cost low-complexity solution that, in the worst case, only requires less than 22% of CPU load and less than 170 MB of memory usage, on a 3.0 GHz Core i7 processor. In addition, using the same SDR modem board, we design an off-line software receiver that also performs time synchronization and carrier frequency offset estimation and compensation