Waveform Performance in 5G Air Interface: A Comprehensive Review of Multicarrier Modulation Schemes

With the growing demand for high-quality, low-latency video and multimediaapplications on wireless devices, today’s cellular providers are seekingadvanced solutions. This has led to the emergence of fifth-generation (5G)mobile communication systems. One of the most widely adopted multicarriermodulation techniques is Cyclic Prefix-Orthogonal Frequency DivisionMultiplexing (CP-OFDM). However, CP-OFDM suffers from poor out-of-band(OoB) radiation due to the use of rectangular pulse shaping filters, and thecyclic prefix reduces spectral efficiency. These limitations make CP-OFDMless suitable for future wireless networks.To address these challenges, Filter Bank Multicarrier with Offset QuadratureAmplitude Modulation (FBMC-OQAM) has gained increasing attention as apromising alternative. The objective of this study is to analyze the applicabilityof FBMC-OQAM for next-generation communication systems. Acomprehensive comparison between OFDM and FBMC is conducted based onkey performance metrics, including spectral efficiency, power spectral density(PSD), and ambiguity diagrams.Simulation results demonstrate that FBMC offers superior bandwidth efficiencycompared to OFDM, indicating its potential to support the demands of futurewireless networks such as 5G.