Performance Evaluation of OFDM and its Variants Including FBMC and UFMC for 5G Wireless Networks

This paper presents a comprehensive performance evaluation of five multicarrier modulation schemes: Cyclic Prefix Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (CP-OFDM), Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT's-OFDM), Windowed OFDM (W-OFDM), Filter Bank Multicarrier (FBMC) and Universal Filtered Multicarrier (UFMC). These schemes are assessed with respect to key performance metrics including Bit Error Rate versus Signal-to-Noise Ratio, Power Spectral Density, and Peak-to-Average Power Ratio. The study aims to highlight the strengths and limitations of each modulation technique in the context of modern wireless communication systems, particularly in 5G and beyond. Through extensive simulations, OFDM’s spectral inefficiency and high PAPR are contrasted against the improved spectral containment of FBMC, the sub-band filtering advantages of UFMC, and the enhanced spectral shaping offered by W-OFDM. CP-OFDM’s robustness and simplicity, along with DFT-s- OFDM’s lower PAPR characteristics, are also analyzed. Results demonstrate that while CPOFDM remains widely adopted due to implementation simplicity and resilience to multipath fading, FBMC and UFMC achieve superior spectral efficiency and reduced out-of-band emissions, and W-OFDM and DFT-s-OFDM provide intermediate trade-offs between complexity, spectral containment, and PAPR reduction. This analysis provides critical insights into the trade-offs involved in selecting an appropriate modulation technique for diverse application scenarios.