Performance Comparison of OFDM-QAM and FBMC-QAM Filtered in Multi-User Massive MIMO Channel Characterization

The current 4G standard or long-term evolution (LTE) system is based on the use of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing-quadrature amplitude modulation (OFDM-QAM) for the downlink and uplink communications. OFDM is an orthogonal block transmission scheme which, in the presence of multi-path fading channels, plain orthogonal multicarrier modulation formats are not able to maintain orthogonality due to inter-symbol interference (ISI) among consecutive multicarrier symbols. A new modulation format is a filter bank multicarrier (FBMC). In this paper, we compare a performance of OFDM-QAM and FBMC-QAM to filter the ISI problem at the receiver. We evaluate the performance under the assumption of multiuser massive MIMO channel as a simplicity. The experimental results are depicted with eye-diagrams and the performance of bit error rates (BERs). As the result, the FBMC-QAM is a potential successor of the dominant OFDM-QAM where BER is acceptable with no ISI and it is definitely a promising modulation to use in 5G signal processing.