Multiple Access and Waveforms for 5G: IDMA and Universal Filtered Multi-Carrier

In this paper we investigate multiple access schemes and multi-carrier waveforms in the context of future 5th Generation (5G) wireless communication systems. We compare classical Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) to Interleave-Division Multiple Access (IDMA) on top of two different multicarrier waveforms: Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and a new approach called Universal Filtered Multi-Carrier (UFMC). A relaxation of timing and frequency alignment requirements is taken into account for supporting applications like Machine Type Communications (MTC) and the Internet of Things (IoT). This paper contains a first uplink comparison scenario where traffic with Relaxed Synchronicity (RS) is embedded into synchronous traffic. Two main users of interest are either using IDMA or FDMA on top of either OFDM or UFMC modulation. Simulation results give first suitability indications for 5G for the combination of waveform and multiple access scheme. The numerical results reveal that IDMA brings in significant enhancement for low rate users, and UFMC introduces additional protection to high-rate users. Both schemes can be combined well.