Resource block Filtered-OFDM for future spectrally agile and power efficient systems

Spectrum sharing is a common paradigm in future communication systems and a spectrally agile baseband waveform with minimal out-of-band emissions is a critical component. In this paper, we propose a new multicarrier modulation technique, called resource block Filtered-OFDM (RB-F-OFDM) and present the transceiver design. This waveform can be used over channels with non-contiguous spectrum fragments and exhibits very low adjacent channel interference, which is required for cognitive radio systems with multi channel carrier aggregation capabilities. As such, regulatory based very stringent adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) and adjacent channel selectivity (ACS) requirements can be met. We show that the transceiver complexity may be reduced by utilizing an efficient polyphase implementation that is commonly used in the filter bank multicarrier (FBMC) modulation. In addition, some efficient peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction techniques can be naturally applied. The new design is backwards compatible with legacy OFDM based systems. Simulation results to evaluate the performance, including measured bit error rate (BER) in multipath channels, are provided.