A survey on 5G new waveform: From energy efficiency aspects

With the aim of delivering any information in anytime and anywhere, the next generation (5G) wireless communication networks become a fashion topic in the wireless research areas and new waveform, as one of the key enabling technologies in 5G physical layer, attracts growing research attentions in recent years. However, the existing way of waveform research or analysis is based on the improvement of spectrum efficiency or utilization, while most of them fails to investigate the energy efficiency behavior, which is shown to be the key performance metric of 5G systems. In this paper, we mainly focus on surveying the waveforms from the energy efficiency point of view. Two categories of waveforms, namely filter-based waveform and spreading-based waveform, are analyzed and the related implementation issues are discussed. Moreover, we implement the above waveforms using software-defined radio based prototype platform and generate the measurement results for the energy efficiency comparison.