Tail shortening by virtual symbols in FBMC-OQAM signals

Filter bank multicarrier with offset quadrature amplitude modulation (FBMC-OQAM) signaling offers almost the full spectral efficiency (one complex symbol per unit area in the time-frequency plane) for long data packets. However, because of the ramp-up and ramp-down of the waveform at the beginning and the end of each packet, its spectral efficiency can drop significantly in short packets/data bursts. In this paper, we propose a novel method that shortens the ramp-up and ramp-down of FBMC-OQAM signals by appending a few virtual symbols at the beginning and the end of each packet and subsequently applying a time window. Simulation results show that the proposed method has a much improved error vector magnitude (EVM) and similar out-of-band (OOB) emission performance, when compared with a truncation method through a similar window, but without transmitting virtual symbols.