Pulse Shaped OFDM for 5G Systems

OFDM-based waveforms with filtering or windowing functionalities are considered key enablers for a flexible air-interface design for multi-service support in future 5G systems. One candidate from this category of waveforms is pulse shaped OFDM, which follows the idea of subcarrier filtering and aims at fully maintaining the advantages of standard OFDM systems while addressing their drawbacks. In this paper, we elaborate on several pulse shaping design methods, and show how pulse shapes can be exploited as an additional degree of freedom to provide better frequency localization and more efficient spectrum utilization under a pre-defined spectrum mask. The performance analysis and evaluation results show that, for a practical mobile communication systems, the application of pulse shaping is a simple and effective means to achieve a lower out-of-band leakage for OFDM systems at virtually no costs. In fact, the complexity increase amounts to 1-2% compared to CP-OFDM only. In addition, the system's robustness against both time and frequency distortions is shown to be substantially improved by a proper pulse shape design. By allowing for the flexible configuration of physical layer parameters per sub-band according to the diverse requirements of future 5G services, pulse shaped OFDM systems can efficiently facilitate asynchronous transmissions and fragmented spectrum access, rendering it beneficial for various mobile-broadband and Internet-of-Things applications.