A Novel Filter-Bank Multicarrier Scheme to Mitigate the Intrinsic Interference: Application to MIMO Systems

Filter-bank multicarrier (FBMC) transmission system was proposed as an alternative approach to orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system since it has a higher spectral efficiency. One of the characteristics of FBMC is that the demodulated transmitted symbols are accompanied by interference terms caused by the neighboring transmitted data in time-frequency domain. The presence of this interference is an issue for some multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) schemes and until today their combination with FBMC remains an open problem. We can cite, among these techniques, the Alamouti scheme and the maximum likelihood detection (MLD) with spatial multiplexing (SM). In this paper, we shall propose a new FBMC scheme and transmission strategy in order to avoid this interference term. This proposed scheme (called FFT-FBMC) transforms the FBMC system into an equivalent system formulated as OFDM regardless of some residual interference. Thus, any OFDM transmission technique can be performed straightforwardly to the proposed FBMC scheme with a corresponding complexity growth compared to the classical FBMC. First, we will develop the FFT-FBMC in the case of single-input single-output (SISO) configuration. Then, we extend its application to SM-MIMO configuration with MLD and Alamouti coding scheme. Simulation results show that FFT-FBMC can almost reach the OFDM performance, but it remains slightly outperformed by OFDM.