Multicarrier systems: A comparison between filter bank based and cyclic prefix based OFDM

In this contribution we perform a review of some recent developments and important results on Filter Bank based Multicarrier (FBMC) systems and make a comparison with Cyclic Prefix (CP) based OFDM. We first give an overview of the system structure and show how the subcarriers are generated. Then the spectral and peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) behaviors are summarized. We review the subcarrier model used in the derivation of the per-subcarrier channel equalizers encountered in the recent literature and present a novel method of per-subcarrier channel estimation based on this same model. We finally compare the performance of both FBMC and CP-OFDM by showing some BER simulation results, where both systems occupy the same bandwidth and provide the same throughput. Even with channel estimation we can see that FBMC still achieves more than 1 dB of advantage in E_b/N0 compared to CP-OFDM with a reasonable training sequence length.