A Survey on Multicarrier Communications: Prototype Filters, Lattice Structures, and Implementation Aspects

TL;DR

This survey comprehensively reviews multicarrier communication schemes, focusing on waveform design, lattice structures, and implementation challenges, aiming to guide future advancements beyond traditional OFDM systems.

Contribution

It introduces a unified framework for multicarrier schemes and analyzes various filter designs and practical implementation issues, advancing the understanding of alternative waveforms.

Findings

Different multicarrier schemes are categorized and compared.

Filter design strategies are evaluated based on multiple criteria.

Implementation challenges such as synchronization and hardware impairments are discussed.

Abstract

Due to their numerous advantages, communications over multicarrier schemes constitute an appealing approach for broadband wireless systems. Especially, the strong penetration of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) into the communications standards has triggered heavy investigation on multicarrier systems, leading to re-consideration of different approaches as an alternative to OFDM. The goal of the present survey is not only to provide a unified review of waveform design options for multicarrier schemes, but also to pave the way for the evolution of the multicarrier schemes from the current state of the art to future technologies. In particular, a generalized framework on multicarrier schemes is presented, based on what to transmit, i.e., symbols, how to transmit, i.e., filters, and where/when to transmit, i.e., lattice. Capitalizing on this framework, different variations of orthogonal, bi-orthogonal, and nonorthogonal multicarrier schemes are discussed. In addition, filter design for various multicarrier systems is reviewed considering four different design perspectives: energy concentration, rapid decay, spectrum nulling, and channel/hardware characteristics. Subsequently, evaluation tools which may be used to compare different filters in multicarrier schemes are studied. Finally, multicarrier schemes are evaluated from the view of the practical implementation issues, such as lattice adaptation, equalization, synchronization, multiple antennas, and hardware impairments.