In this paper we give an overview and a comparison of the possible waveforms for white space applications. Four physical layer schemes for cognitive radio are selected for study: Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), DFT-Spread OFDM (DFTS-OFDM), Constant Envelope OFDM (CE-OFDM) and Filter Bank Multicarrier (FBMC). The comparison is mainly based on the side effects of various non-ideal analog components (power amplifier, local oscillator) and residual synchronization errors such as frequency offset. As we will show, each technique has different sensitivity to the various impairments. The comparisons will be performed via spectral density functions and bit error rates (BER)
