2019 Volume E102.B Issue 8 Pages 1728-1740
A variety of all-new systems such as a massive machine type communication (mMTC) system will be supported in 5G and beyond. Although each mMTC device occupies quite narrow bandwidth, the massive number of devices expected will generate a vast array of traffic and consume enormous spectrum resources. Therefore, it is necessary to proactively gather up and exploit fractional spectrum resources including guard bands that are secured but unused by the existing Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems. The guard band is originally secured as a margin for high out-of-band emission (OOBE) caused by the discontinuity between successive symbols in the cyclic prefix-based orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CP-OFDM), and new-waveforms enabling high OOBE suppression have been widely researched to efficiently allocate narrowband communication to the frequency gap. Time-domain windowing is a well-known signal processing technique for reducing OOBE with low complexity and a universal time-domain windowed OFDM (UTW-OFDM) with a long transition duration exceeding the CP length has demonstrated its ability in WLAN-based systems. In this paper, we apply UTW-OFDM to the LTE downlink system and comprehensively evaluate its performance under the channel models defined by 3GPP. Specifically, we evaluate OOBE reduction and block error rate (BLER) by computer simulation and clarify how far OOBE can be reduced without degrading communication quality. Furthermore, we estimate the implementation complexity of the proposed UTW-OFDM, the conventional CP-OFDM, and the universal filtered-OFDM (UF-OFDM) by calculating the number of required multiplications. These evaluation and estimation results demonstrate that the proposed UTW-OFDM is a practical new-waveform applicable to the 5G and beyond.
