Research on FBMC/OQAM Spectral and Energy Characteristics for Different Prototype Filters

In this paper we investigate the performance of filter bank multicarrier system with offset QAM modulation (FBMC/OQAM) and compare it with commonly used cyclic prefix orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CP-OFDM) multicarrier scheme. FBMC utilizes special prototype filtering, on which many system parameters depend, and therefore the accurate choice of prototype filter is crucial for the overall performance. We consider known filters such as PHYDYAS, Nyquist, and filters obtained during optimization procedure and compare the corresponding bandwidth efficiency, level of out-of-band emissions, and the power spectral density forms with OFDM system. In addition, we estimate BER performance in AWGN and fading pedestrian, vehicle and urban (EPA, EVA and ETU) channels and calculate complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF) for estimation of peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) to understand the overall energy efficiency of system with different prototype filters. The results demonstrate that the energy efficiency of FBMC/OQAM system for certain prototype filters is relatively close to performance of the OFDM system, while bandwidth utilization is significantly better.