On the effects of carrier frequency offset on cyclic prefix based OFDM and filter bank based multicarrier systems

Being sensitive to carrier frequency offset (CFO) is known to be one of the main drawbacks of multicarrier systems. In this paper, the effects of CFO on a filter bank based multicarrier system (FBMC) in a multipath fading channel are discussed, where an ideal root-raised cosine (RRC) filter with roll-off factor 1 is used as the prototype filter which enables analytical derivations of the interference caused by the CFO. Based on these results, an approximation on the SNR degradation with very small CFO is also given. Numerical experiments as well as Monte Carlo simulations are done to verify the analysis and the accuracy of the approximation in FBMC systems. A comparison with the SNR degradations in cyclic prefix based orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CP-OFDM) systems has indicated an advantage of FBMC systems as being more robust to frequency misalignments.