Spectral Efficiency of Multicarrier Schemes for 5G

This paper compares the spectral efficiency of some of the most popular multicarrier schemes proposed for the fifth generation (5G) of cellular systems, such as orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), filterbank multicarrier (FBMC), generalized frequency-division multiplexing (GFDM), and universal filtered multicarrier (UFMC). First, we propose a unified signal model valid for many multicarrier schemes. Second, we employ the mismatched detection theory, together with the unified signal model, to obtain closed-form achievable lower bounds on the channel capacity, conditioned on the multipath channel realization. Third, we numerically compare the achievable spectral efficiency (ASE) of OFDM, FBMC, GFDM and UFMC, in different multipath channel scenarios. Our analysis proves that the best (ASE-optimal) multicarrier scheme depends on the channel model and on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).