Orthogonal Waveforms and Filter Banks for Future Communication Systems

efforts.

Part I

Application Drivers

Outline

Chapter 1. New Waveforms for New Services in 5G

Chapter 2. TVWS as an Emerging Application of Cognitive Radio

Chapter 3. Broadband Private Mobile Radio (PMR)/Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) Services Evolution

Chapter 4. Application of FBMC in Optical Communications

Chapter 1

New Waveforms for New Services in 5G

Gerhard Wunder⁎; Thorsten Wild†; Frank Schaich†; Dimitri Kténas‡; Jean Baptiste Doré‡; Ivan Gaspar§; Gerhard Fettweis§    ⁎Heisenberg Communications and Information Theory Group, FU, Berlin, Germany

†NOKIA Bell Labs, Stuttgart, Germany

‡CEA-Leti, Grenoble, France

§Vodafone Chair Mobile Communications Systems, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

Abstract

Fundamental research for 5G is well under way, and mobile communication networks on the brink toward a new innovation cycle including intriguing application visions such as Gigabit wireless connectivity, Internet of Things, and Tactile Internet. From a technical perspective it seems to be utmost challenging to provide uniform service experience to users under the premises of heterogeneous networking or future small-cell scenarios. Not only must the network operators be well prepared to take on the challenge of a much higher per-user rate and increasing overall required bandwidth but also to realize service differentiation with very different (virtually contradicting) application requirements. Consequently, the radio access has to be flexible, scalable, content aware, robust, reliable, and efficient in terms of energy and spectrum. In fact, with the limitations of current 4G system outlined in this chapter, the requirements will put further pressure on the common value chains on which the operators rely in order to compensate for investment costs for future user services. Hence, there is a clear motivation for an innovative and in part disruptive redesign of the physical (PHY) layer as presented in this chapter.

Keywords

5G; Waveforms; Gigabit wireless connectivity; Internet of things; Sporadic traffic; Gabor expansion; Tactile Internet; UFMC; FBMC; GFDM

Chapter Outline

1.1  Key Communication Scenarios

1.1.1  Sporadic Traffic

1.1.2  Spectral and Temporal Fragmentation

1.1.3  Real-Time Constraints

1.2  5G New Air Interface Core Elements

1.2.1  Waveforms

1.2.2  Unified Frame Structure, One-Shot Transmission and Autonomous Timing Advance

1.3  5G Waveform Candidates

1.3.1  UFMC

1.3.1.1  UFMC and UF-OFDM Overview

1.3.1.2  UFMC Basic Description

1.3.1.3  UFMC Results

1.3.2  FBMC

1.3.3  GFDM

1.3.4  BFDM

1.3.4.1  A General Approach to Capture Multiterminal Interference

1.3.4.2  Numerical Example: OFDM

1.3.4.3  Numerical Example: Spline

1.3.4.4  Reference Simulations

1.4  Concluding Remarks

References

1.1 Key Communication Scenarios

Fundamental research for 5G is well under way, and mobile communication networks are on the brink toward a new innovation cycle [1–3]. The main drivers are:

•  Gigabit wireless connectivity is required, for example, in large crowd gatherings with possibly interactively connected devices using angle-controlled 3D video streaming, augmented reality, etc.

•  The Internet of Things (IoT) will connect billions of devices, i.e., the things of our everyday life, which is far more than 4G can technically and economically accommodate. This will then open up new ways to monitor, assist, secure, control, e.g., in the telemedicine area, smart homes, smart factory, etc.

•  Moreover, the Tactile Internet comprises a vast amount of real-time applications with extremely low latency requirements including industrial wireless applications. Motivated by the human tactile sense, which requires round-trip times in the order of 1 ms, 5G can then be applied for steering and control scenarios implying a disruptive change from today's content-driven communications. This is far shorter than current 4G cellular systems allow for, missing the target by nearly two orders of magnitude.

From a technical perspective it seems to be utmost challenging to provide uniform service experience to users under the premises of heterogeneous networking or future small-cell scenarios. Not only must the network operators be well prepared to take on the challenge of a much higher per-user rate and increasing overall required bandwidth but also to realize service differentiation with very different (virtually contradicting) application requirements. Consequently, the radio access has to be flexible, scalable, content aware, robust, reliable, and efficient in terms of energy and spectrum. In fact, with the limitations of current 4G system outlined further, the requirements will put further pressure on the common value chains on which the operators rely in order to compensate for investment costs for future user services. Hence, there is a clear motivation for an innovative and in part disruptive redesign of the physical (PHY) layer.

Let us discuss several intriguing examples.

1.1.1 Sporadic Traffic

Devices that generate sporadic traffic (for example, machine-type communication (MTC) devices in the IoT) should not be forced to be integrated into the bulky synchronization procedure of the LTE-A PHY layer random access [2,3], which has been deliberately designed to meet orthogonal constraints. Instead, ideally, they awake occasionally and then should transmit their messages right away and only be coarsely synchronized. By doing so, MTC traffic would be removed from standard uplink data pipes, with drastically reduced signaling overhead. Therefore, alleviating the synchronism requirement can significantly improve operational capabilities, network performance, user experience, and the lifetimes of autonomous MTC nodes, which are typically heavily resource-(energy-, computation-, memory-)constrained.

1.1.2 Spectral and Temporal Fragmentation

The LTE-A waveform imposes generous guard bands on other legacy networks to satisfy spectral-mask requirements, which either severely deteriorate spectral efficiency or even prevent band usage at all, which is again an artifact of strict orthogonality and synchronism constraints within the PHY layer [2,3]. Moreover, in a scenario with uncoordinated interference from pico- or femtocells and highly overlapping coverage, it seems illusive to provide the degree of coordination to maintain synchronism and orthogonality in the network while calling for new waveforms as well. In addition to spectral fragmentation, temporal fragmentation is another key issue. This occurs, for example, due to sporadic access in the asynchronous uplink physical layer random access channel (PRACH). Notably, asynchronous signaling also matters in the downlink in the context of cooperative multipoint (CoMP). In conclusion, such 5G scenarios where multiple users are allocated a pool of frequencies with relaxed (or even no) synchronization in time must be addressed by new waveforms. Such waveforms must implement sharp frequency notches and tight spectral masks in order not to interfere with other legacy systems and must be robust to asynchronous signaling and handle uncoordinated interference. Traditional OFDM schemes are not suited due to the inflexible handling of guard intervals (GIs), cyclic prefixes (CPs), or cyclic suffixes, as well as poor spectral localization. In a later section, we discuss waveforms achieving 100 times better localization. New waveforms thus make a real difference in fragmented spectrum and CoMP scenarios.

1.1.3 Real-Time Constraints

Fourth-generation systems offer latencies of several tens of milliseconds between terminal and base station, which originate from resource scheduling, frame processing, retransmission procedures, and so on [2,3]. However, future application scenarios such as the tactile Internet scenario require ultralow latency matched with the human tactile sense. In such an environment, a massive number of distributed sensors and actuators will be connected to enable real-time tactile interaction in an augmented way. Sharing the medium becomes an additional challenge and imposes short wake-up cycles on the nodes and the use of burst transmission. Instead of consuming spectrum and power resources by introducing sophisticated algorithms to reach synchronism, an asynchronous approach appears promising. In order to achieve ultralow latency, each and every element of the communication and control chain must be optimized.

1.2 5G New Air Interface Core Elements

1.2.1 Waveforms

The ability to explore time and frequency dimensions is one core element of a flexible waveform. To better understand how these domains can be engineered, consider a signal sprovides exact information about the behavior at any time instant. However, no information about frequency components at these positions is available. Instead, we can look at the Fourier transform (FT) of the signal, which provides exact information about frequency components, but no information on time-domain behavior is obtained. It is possible to gather information about frequency components of a signal at certain positions in time by looking at the FT of the multiplication of the signal with a window function, which leads to the short-time Fourier transform (STFT). But the output of the STFT can be highly redundant if the time and frequency parameters are kept independent.

In 1947, Dennis Gabor proposed to represent a signal as a linear combination of Gaussian functions that are shifted in time and frequency to positions in a regular grid; see Fig. 1.1. He chose the Gaussian function because it has the best localization in time and frequency simultaneously, so that local behavior of the signal is most accurately described. Gabor concluded that the original signal is fully characterized by the coefficients multiplying the Gaussian functions, establishing the foundation of time-frequency analysis. Later it was shown that the uniqueness and existence of such an expansion critically depends on the density of the grid of time-frequency shifts, which is defined as the product of spacing in time T and frequency F. Densities larger than 1 imply nonunique expansions, whereas with densities smaller than 1, expansion coefficients only exist for certain signals. Nowadays, the linear combination of time-frequency shifted windows is known as a Gabor expansion, and the calculation of the STFT with a certain window at a regular grid is known as a Gabor transform. Expansion and transform windows are in a dual relation, i.e., the coefficients that are used to expand to a certain signal with a given window are provided by the Gabor transform of that signal with the dual window. In case the window and its dual are equal, the window is said to be orthogonal, and expansion and transform reduce to well-known orthogonal expansion series.

Figure 1.1 Illustration of Gabor expansion. The expanded signal is the sum of scaled time-frequency shifts of a prototype window. The scaling factors are given by the Gabor expansion coefficients.

A prominent example is OFDM, which performs a Gabor expansion using a finite discrete set of rectangular window functions with length T in the frequency grid. In the discrete Gabor expansion and transform, which in the OFDM case is the discrete Fourier transform (DFT), all signals are assumed to be periodic in time and frequency. However, nonperiodic time-continuous scenarios can be approximated by choosing long frames and appropriate sampling frequencies.

In this book chapter, the following waveform approaches will be covered:

•  GFDM can be seen as a more generic block-oriented filtered multicarrier system that follows the Gabor principles. Basically, the parameterization of the waveform directly influences i) transmitter window, ii) time-frequency grid structure, and iii) transform length and can hence provide means to emulate a multitude of conventional multicarrier systems.

•  FBMC/OQAM belongs to the family of filterbank-based waveforms. The principles revolve around filtering the subcarriers in the system while retaining orthogonality. As the name suggests, the essence of this candidate waveform is offset modulation, which allows avoiding interference between real and imaginary signal components.

•  BFDM directly relates to the theory of Gabor frames. Signal generation can be considered a Gabor expansion, whereas the biorthogonal receive filter constitutes a Gabor transform.

•  In UFMC, a pulse shaping filter is applied to a group of conventional OFDM subcarriers. This approach can be also represented in the context of the Gabor frame.

These waveforms have been thoroughly investigated, each particularly related to certain scenarios as described in detail in the next section.

1.2.2 Unified Frame Structure, One-Shot Transmission and Autonomous Timing Advance

The unified frame structure concept, depicted by Fig. 1.2, provides a flexible multiservice supporting solution in one single integrated 5G air interface. Each square in Fig. 1.2 represents a single resource element, a single subcarrier of a single multicarrier symbol.

Figure 1.2 Unified frame structure.

For supporting the heterogeneous 5G system requirements, the frame is divided into four different areas:

•  The type I area carries classical bit pipe traffic. High-volume data transmissions are served here. High spectral efficiency is the key performance indicator to be pursued. A high degree of orthogonality and strict synchronism is kept in this service type.

•  Type II traffic is rather similar to type I traffic. Basically, the same service and device classes are supported. In contrast to type I, users being confronted with a higher degree of interference from adjacent cells are assembled here. Key building block for efficient multiuser separation is vertical layering (see the next section). Synchronization and orthogonality requirements are not as tight as with type I traffic.

•  Type III traffic includes sporadic sensor/actor messages requiring low latencies. As outlined above, closed-loop synchronization is less suited here. Instead transmissions are only loosely synchronized (open-loop), and a contention-based access technique is used.

•  Type IV traffic includes sporadic sensor/actor messages tolerating high latencies. Multiple signal layers are used, either using spreading or other multiple access schemes (e.g., interleaved division multiple access (IDMA)).

The unified frame concept shall be the main part of the standardization processes to be initiated in the future. In that context, exemplary scheduling/multiple access schemes are defined as follows:

•  Dynamic, channel adaptive resource scheduling for traffic Type I using standard or advanced resource scheduling mechanisms.

•  Semistatic/persistent scheduling for traffic Type II. From MAC point of view, it is necessary to decide on the amount of resources allocated for this type of traffic since schedulers will not adapt to specific parts of the frequency (may also be used for high-speed terminals).

•  One-shot transmission using contention-like-based approaches for random access based on sparse signal processing methodology [4–6] respectively waveform design, which enables payload (Type III and IV) transmission in PRACH, in short data PRACH (D-PRACH). Clearly, by doing so, sporadic traffic is removed from standard uplink data pipes resulting in drastically reduced signaling overhead. Another issue that is closely related to the signaling overhead is the complexity and power consumption of the devices. Notably, waveform design in such a setting is necessary since the OFDM waveform used in LTE cannot handle the highly asynchronous access of different devices with possible negative delays or delays beyond the CPs. Clearly, guards could be introduced between the individual (small) data sections, however, which make the approach again very inefficient.

•  Notably, traffic types II and III rely on open-loop synchronization. The device listens to the downlink and synchronizes itself coarsely, based on synchronization channel and/or reference symbols, similar to 4G systems. Furthermore, the devices may apply some autonomously derived timing advance, which we call autonomous timing advance (ATA) relevant also particularly for MTC. ATA effectively shifts the receiver's reception window, which is aligned with the LTE broadcast signal, toward both positive and negative time delays. In such reception window, the multiuser interference is symmetric around the zero. This can indeed significantly lower the distortion for the new waveforms and, in particular, drastically with respect to OFDM.

1.3 5G Waveform Candidates

1.3.1 UFMC

1.3.1.1 UFMC and UF-OFDM Overview

Universal Filtered Multicarrier modulation (UFMC) [7] is a subband-wise filtered variant of OFDM and thus also is denoted Universal Filtered (UF-) OFDM [8]. In practical OFDM systems, typically entire groups of subcarriers are allocated, organized in subbands, e.g., one or more physical resource blocks (PRB) in the terminology of LTE. In a multiuser setting, different subbands are reserved for different users. The driver for improved spectral localization is thus typically associated to subband-wise resource usage, which motivates the proposed subband-wise filtering.

With applying subband-wise filtering, improved in-carrier spectral localization is achieved, removing a weak point of OFDM. This improved spectral localization is an enabler for the multiservice air interface: It enables the system to multiplex signals with different multicarrier numerologies and allows tolerating time-frequency misalignments between different uplink allocations. An adaptation of numerologies and the capability to frequency-multiplex them is motivated by the very diverse nature of use cases and propagation environments which 5G has to support [9,10]. Robustness to time-frequency misalignments is helpful when frequency-multiplexing of broadband traffic and open-loop synchronized contention-based access traffic is carried out [11]. This allows light-weighted protocols [12] for efficient small packet transportation with low overhead and energy consumption.

A benefit of subband-wise filtering compared to subcarrier-wise filtering is that the filter is applied to an entire allocation (e.g., 12 subcarriers or more). Thus, the filters are broader in frequency domain than with subcarrier-wise filtering, and hence the filter impulse response is comparatively short in time domain, making UFMC well suited for short bursts [7], supporting low latency and MTC services well. A typical design choice so far is to use filter lengths that are in the order of typical cyclic prefix lengths in OFDM. Note that this is much shorter than FBMC, where typical filter lengths are in the order of 2–4 multicarrier symbols. UFMC targets QAM modulation and thus is well compatible to MIMO and coordinated multipoint (CoMP) techniques. In [13], it has been applied to uplink CoMP for improved robustness against carrier frequency offsets.

A reasonable option for UFMC is to operate with symbol durations larger than the inverse subcarrier spacing, enabling the use of a guard interval between multicarrier symbol bodies. Although most publications have set the filter length equal to the guard interval in time, this is not a must. Instead, it is a degree of freedom to balance temporal and spectral localization and thus to trade robustness in multipath propagation environments against protection against any sources of intercarrier interference [14,15]. Any variant of OFDM can use a cyclic prefix (CP) or a zero postfix (ZP) for delay spread protection [16], which are in most cases equivalent. UFMC is typically associated with the ZP-variant. The UF-OFDM concept in general both allows for CP and ZP, as discussed in [14].

1.3.1.2 UFMC Basic Description

for the kth subband for one UFMC multicarrier symbol can be written as

for a subband of Q , N is the FFT size, carrying out the linear convolution of a length L can be set to zero generating a low-power tail, as done in [17] for OFDM. This zero-tail-DFT-spreading technique for UFMC allows for additional adaptive delay spread protection if required. Fig. 1.4 depicts the UFMC spectrum.

Figure 1.3 Block diagram of UFMC processing chain with optional DFT-precoding and filter precompensation.

Figure 1.4 Spectrum for 4 PRBs; UFMC using Dolph–Chebychev filters with 80 dB side lobe attenuation; with and without transmit filter preequalization, compared to CP-OFDM and windowed OFDM.

For UFMC, low complex transmitter implementations exist, e.g., based on frequency domain filtering such as presented in [18]. For transmissions with relatively small allocation bandwidths (e.g., 12 or less subcarriers, often used by low-end MTC), even less complex implementations based on look-up tables exist [14]. The baseline receiver uses the N-point FFT [14], so the receiver complexity is almost identical to CP-OFDM. Note that subcarrier outputs after the FFT are fully orthogonal in case of a flat channel. Additional options for windowing and filtering [9,11,16] are beneficial for additional protection against intercarrier interference sources, such as mixed numerology.

Since UFMC is very close to OFDM, all the existing OFDM signal processing techniques can be reused, such as efficient frequency domain channel estimation techniques [19].

1.3.1.3 UFMC Results

The UFMC time-frequency resource efficiency in short bursts has been compared against OFDM and FBMC in [7]. It has been shown that guard bands compared to conventional OFDM can be reduced, increasing spectral efficiency over OFDM by roughly 10%. Furthermore, the short filter lengths bring a significant spectral efficiency advantage over FBMC in case the transmission lasts only a few multicarrier symbols, when accounting for the time overhead of the filter. Filter optimization for UFMC has been addressed in [20,21], showing that SIR can be improved over OFDM by about 10 dB with carrier frequency offsets being equally distributed between ±0.1 relative to the subcarrier spacing. It is notable that the resulting filters from those leakage-based optimization are in most cases very close to the Dolph–Chebychev filters. This is not surprising as the Dolph–Chebychev design for a given main lobe width provides the lowest maximum side lobe level. Another nice property of the Dolph–Chebychev filters is that they can be tuned via the side lobe attenuation parameter.

Current 5G discussions incorporate the introduction of new nonorthogonal superposition-based multiple access schemes, such as IDMA. In [22], the compatibility of UFMC with IDMA was shown; both approaches complement each other well for efficient multiuser detection and contention-based access with relaxed time-frequency alignment.

Coexistence of UFMC and OFDM within the same carrier has shown to work well in [23], which opens up the option for a smooth migration from 4G to 5G and shows a wide range of parameterization options a 5G system can make use of when applying UFMC. UFMC results for MIMO including a practical hardware implementation in [24] have demonstrated a very good MIMO capability of the new waveform. As an interesting example result, Fig. 1.5 shows the uplink spectral efficiency performance in a mixed numerology setting when comparing UFMC against OFDM and windowed OFDM. The results include channel estimation with 1-D MMSE interpolation using an LTE-like pilot structure. The allocation of interest is 48 subcarriers wide with 15-kHz subcarrier spacing. Neighbor allocations are on each side with 48 subcarriers using 30-kHz subcarrier spacing. UFMC uses Dolph–Chebychev filters across 48 subcarriers with side lobe attenuation of 75 dB. Windowed OFDM uses an overlapping raised cosine filter where the overlap spans the cyclic prefix length. Note that maximum performance for UFMC is almost reached with a single guard subcarrier and that spectral efficiency is significantly higher than basic OFDM or windowed OFDM.

Figure 1.5 Spectral efficiency in mixed numerology uplink scenario using the parameters of [15]; 64-QAM, rate 1/2, ETU channel 3 km/h, SNR = 30 dB, 4-GHz carrier frequency.

1.3.2 FBMC

With FBMC, a set of parallel data symbols are transmitted through a bank of modulated filters. The choice of the prototype filter controls the localization in frequency of the generated pulse and can provide better adjacent channel leakage performance in comparison to OFDM. OQAM, combined with Nyquist constraints on the prototype filter, is used to guarantee orthogonality between adjacent symbols and adjacent carriers while providing maximum spectral efficiency of the prototype filter is a multiple of the size of the FFT M, where K is an integer and usually referred to as the overlapping factor. Frequency sampling technique is often considered to design the prototype filter. The technique has been proven simple and yet very efficient to build an almost optimal filter as a function of K, the frequency domain pulse response coefficients are equal to [25]

(1.1)

,

(1.2)

,

(1.3)

The impulse response of the prototype filter is then given by

(1.4)

With the frequency spreading technique, symbols are spread over P carriers by filtering the output of the OQAM process by the frequency domain pulse response. The output is then processed through an IFFT of size KM. This P/S conversion is called overlap-and-sum. Once the transient period is over, 2K of the KM-IFFT output samples are added together at any given time. Therefore, the time domain signal can be expressed as [28]

(1.5)

where matrix G introduces x samples delay between the block of samples. Eq. filtered FBMC/OQAM symbols that overlap over time. The corresponding transceiver is depicted in Fig. 1.6. By using the property of the prototype filter and the property of the spreading process (in frequency domain) it is possible to derive a closed-form expression of the time domain signal illustrating the use of the Fourier transform of size M combined with a PPN filter. This formulation is interesting for practical implementation as demonstrated in [25].

Figure 1.6 FBMC/OQAM transmitter block diagram.

At the receiver side, the dual operation of the overlap-and-sum operation of the transmitter is a sliding window in the time domain that selects KM samples. The FFT is then applied on every block of KM selected points. Equalization is applied using a single-tap equalizer and is followed by the filtering with the prototype matched filter (Fig. 1.7A). Data at the output of the matched filter is then demapped to compute a log-likelihood ratio for the input of the inner decoder. Because the size of the FFT is K-times larger than the multicarrier symbol time period, the signal at the output of the FFT is oversampled by a factor K compared to the carrier spacing. This property gives a significant advantage to FS-FBMC receiver when the channel is exhibiting large delay spread or in case of synchronization mismatch. Of course, the classical PPN receiver scheme can also be applied [25] (Fig. 1.7B).

Figure 1.7 FBMC/OQAM receiver block diagram. (A) Using frequency spreading approach. (B) Using classical PPN approach.

As reported in [27], the well-localized frequency response of FBMC/OQAM entitles the use of fragmented spectrum with minor interference on adjacent bands. Very good performance of FS-FBMC is also demonstrated in nonsynchronous uplink access due to the high stop-band attenuation of the prototype filter combined with the asynchronous frequency domain processing of the receiver [27]. Since the structure of the proposed FS-FBMC receiver is robust to channel exhibiting very large delay spread [27], this implies that carrier spacing can be significantly increased when FBMC is considered, giving the waveform a significant advantage for resilience to Doppler shift, CFO, and phase noise. It also gives advantages to the support of small data packet as the duration of the pulse can be reduced. Finally, if the carrier spacing is increased, then the number of active carriers is decreased; consequently, we could expect a better power efficiency of a transmitter if the PAPR could be reduced.

We depict in Fig. 1.8 the PSD for OFDM and FBMC/OQAM for several values of K. The overlapping factor directly controls the location in the frequency domain, and the spectral containment can be heavily relaxed by decreasing K, the FBMC prototype filter shows good performance if a small frequency spacing is inserted between two adjacent users (here one RB).