Abstract. The fifth generation (5G) communication systems are required to perform significantly better than the existing fourth generation (4G) systems in data rate, capacity, coverage, latency, energy consumption and cost. Hence, 5G needs to achieve considerable enhancements in the areas of bandwidth, spectral, energy, and signaling efficiencies and cost per bit. The new radio access technology (RAT) of 5G physical layer needs to utilize an efficient waveform to meet the demands of 5G. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is considered as a baseline for up to 30 GHz. However, a major drawback of OFDM systems is their large peak to average power ratio (PAPR). Here in this thesis, a simple selective-mapping (SLM) technique using scrambling is proposed to reduce the PAPR of OFDM signals. This technique selects symbol sequences with high PAPR and scrambles them until a PAPR sequence below a specific threshold is generated. The computational complexity of the proposed scheme is considerably lower than that of the traditional SLM. Also, performance of the system is investigated through simulations and more than 4.5 dB PAPR reduction is achieved. In addition, performance of single carrier waveforms is analyzed in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems as an alternative to OFDM. Performance of a single carrier massive MIMO system is presented for both uplink and downlink with single user and multiple user cases and the effect of pre-coding on the PAPR is studied. A variety of channel configurations were investigated such as correlated channels, practical channels and the channels with errors in channel estimate. Furthermore, the candidate coding schemes are investigated for the new RAT in the 5G standard corresponding the activities in the third generation partnership project (3GPP). The schemes are evaluated in terms of block error rate (BLER), bit error rate (BER), computational complexity, and flexibility. These parameters comprise a suitable set to assess the performance of different services and applications. Turbo, low density parity check (LDPC), and polar codes are considered as the candidate schemes. These are investigated in terms of obtaining suitable rates, block lengths by proper design for a fair comparison. The simulations have been carried out in order to obtain BLER / BER performance for various code rates and block lengths, in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. Although polar codes perform well at short block lengths, LDPC has a relatively good performance at all the block lengths and code rates. In addition, complexity of the LDPC codes is relatively low. Furthermore, BLER/BER performances of the coding schemes in Rayleigh fading channels are investigated and found that the fading channel performance follows a similar trend as the performance in the AWGN channel
