Comparative Study of Modulation Techniques for 5G Networks

Fifth Generation (5G) communication systems applications are expected to use or require lower latency, higher data rates, and efficient spectrum usage which are impacted by the adopted modulation scheme. Thus, proper selection and usage of efficient modulation scheme is crucial. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) suffers from high peak to average power ratio, which results in low efficiency of power amplifier and increases the battery consumption. Moreover, the OFDM spectrum has high out of band side lobes or side lobe leakage causing problem of low spectral efficiency. So, to overcome some of these drawbacks new modulation techniques for 5G communication systems such as Generalized Frequency Division Multiplexing (GFDM), filtered – OFDM (f-OFDM), Universal Filtered Multi-Carrier (UFMC), Filter Bank Multi-Carrier (FBMC) are considered. In this paper, we perform the comparative study of UFMC and FBMC in terms of Spectral Efficiency (SE) and Power Spectral Density (PSD). Simulations were done to evaluate the performance variation that can be achieved by varying the parameters of these modulation techniques, such as filter length, burst duration and overlapping factor. Our simulation results show that, FBMC has better SE for large burst durations whereas UFMC is better for small burst durations. In terms of PSD, FBMC has lower side lobe than UFMC. This implies that FBMC is more preferable to minimize the inter symbol interference and inter carrier interference.