Filter bank OFDM: A new way of looking at FBMC

Filter Bank Multi-Carrier (FBMC) with Offset Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (OQAM) has been actively investigated for decades. Now it is also a candidate for 5G air interface waveform. Nevertheless, when it goes to standardization consideration, people still prefer Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM), in spite of its identified drawbacks for 5G. Such conservative attitude comes from the fact that people are not sure about how costly it would be to adapt all the existing OFDM-based solutions to FBMC systems, in particular for Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) techniques. For FBMC, these can be interpreted as compatibility and complexity issues. In this paper, we intend to solve these two issues by introducing a new way of looking at FBMC, where we challenge the traditional transmission fashion. Eventually, our study brings us to a more concise and compatible format which we call it Filter-Bank OFDM.