A New Framework of Filter Bank Multi-Carrier: Getting Rid of Subband Orthogonality

Filter bank multi-carrier (FBMC) entitles many advantages over orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and is considered to be a more competitive waveform in the future generation cellular communications. In current FBMC, the prototype filter is deliberately designed to meet the perfect reconstruction (PR) constraint to establish subband orthogonality in real domain, which may not be optimal from communication perspective. In this paper, we challenge the necessity of PR constraint by proposing a new FBMC framework, which directly accepts non-orthogonal transmission. The resulting imperfect reconstruction FBMC (iPR-FBMC) has several advantages over its PR FBMC counterpart: 1) the constraint on the prototype filter is relaxed; 2) more importantly, the prototype filter can now be optimized with new goal of improving the detection performance rather than having to meet the PR condition; and 3) it allows for more flexible subband management in multi-user scenario. We will show how those advantages can be exploited. Simulations show that with moderate increase in computational complexity, the proposed iPR-FBMC with optimized prototype filter has superior bit error rate (BER) performance to existing FBMC with PR constraint and even outperforms OFDM, especially in highly frequency selective channels. The findings may shed light into potential research on non-orthogonal FBMC without PR constraint.