Comparing the performance of OFDM and FBMC multicarrier systems in doubly-dispersive wireless channels

In mobile communications, the most widely used multicarrier technique, namely OFDM, is known to exhibit performance limitations in high speed scenarios. FBMC is an alternative approach and, among FBMC techniques, the recently introduced FBMC-PAM scheme has emerged as the most robust to CFO. Therefore, it is chosen here as the challenger of OFDM for performance comparison in doubly dispersive channels. After presentation of the system model, multicarrier scheme and wireless channel, an analytical evaluation of the BER in the particular case of single path time-varying channel is provided for FBMC-PAM and validated through simulations. Then, simulation results are reported for both OFDM and FBMC-PAM, using the 3GPP multipath channel models. It appears that FBMC-PAM can outperform OFDM in highly time-varying frequency-selective channels.