Performance comparison of CP-OFDM and OQAM-OFDM systems based on LTE parameters

Currently deployed mobile communication systems are designed to deliver a proper Quality of Service (QoS) only in certain channel environments. The necessary channel adaptivity is utilized by adaptive modulation and coding schemes by giving up channel capacity. For transmissions in dispersive channels theory predicts a performance gain, when the pulse shape of the mobile communication system is adapted accordingly to the delay and Doppler spread. Therefore, we investigate the quantitative gains for a 3GPP/LTE like system utilizing a low-complexity zero-forcing equalizer in terms of reconstruction quality, bit error rate (BER) and normalized data rate with respect to different channel environments. For common 3GPP/LTE user scenarios it is shown, that Offset Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (OQAM) Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has similar performance compared to cyclic prefix (CP)-OFDM. However, OQAM-OFDM significantly outperforms CP-OFDM in bad urban and hilly environments wherein the CP of 3GPP/LTE is violated. In these scenarios, the data rate can be improved up to a factor of 3.5 and a SNR gain of about 9 dB can be attained. The simulation results show that the application of OQAM-OFDM to future mobile communication systems is a promising approach.