Performance Evaluation of Multicarrier Modulation Techniques Using Discrete Wavelet Transform for 5G Wireless Communication System and Beyond

Abstract

Multicarrier modulation schemes have gained widespread adoption in wireless communication systems when compared to single-carrier modulations. Multicarrier schemes can overcome the challenges posed by multipath fading channels. Various researchers have proposed different multi-carrier modulation techniques to meet customer needs and mitigate the limitations of existing techniques. One widely adopted multi-carrier modulation technique in fourth-generation (4G) technology is Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). However, the current Cyclic Prefix-OFDM (CP-OFDM) falls short of meeting the demands of 5G wireless communication systems because it suffers from significant drawbacks, such as Out-of-Band Emission (OOBE) and dependency on CP. To address the challenges associated with OFDM, different multicarrier modulation techniques such as Filtered-OFDM (F-OFDM) and Filter Bank Multicarrier Modulation (FBMC) have been employed. The growing demand for wireless communication has prompted the need for further advancements in wireless communication systems. In this study, the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is introduced as an innovative signal analysis approach within multicarrier modulation, offering numerous advantages, including support for high-speed applications, and efficient bandwidth utilization over the existing multi-carrier modulation techniques. The proposed wavelet-based multi-carrier modulation, featuring higher-order Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM), aims to address the limitations of OFDM and other multi-carrier techniques. The performances of each multi-carrier modulation technique with DWT have been analyzed based on performance parameters such as spectral efficiency (SE), Power Spectral Density (PSD), Bit Error Rate (BER), Peak-to-Average Power ratio (PAPR), and Computational Complexity. The performance of wavelet-based multicarrier modulation achieved significantly higher spectral efficiency, lower computational complexity, and reduced BER. Simulation results have shown that the PSD of DWT-F-OFDM achieved a 29.99 dBW/Hz reduction in OOBE compared to the FBMC-QAM techniques. DWT-based multicarrier modulation provides the lowest PAPR compared to the conventional candidate multicarrier modulation techniques. From the result analysis, The PAPR characteristics of haar and bior2.2-based multicarrier schemes reduce the PAPR of OFDM by 3.72,3.66 and 3.36 dB, FBMC-OQAM by 5.18,4.42 and 4.00 dB, and F-OFDM by 2.42, 2.18 and 2.10 dB for higher-order QAM (64-QAM,256-QAM and 1024-QAM )modulation respectively compared to existing candidate multi-carrier modulation techniques. Additionally, the proposed DWT-multicarrier modulation is applied to BER analysis for the Vehicular and Pedestrian channel models. Based on the result analysis, it is observed that the bior2.2,sym4, and haar wavelets multicarrier modulation techniques showed better BER performance for Vehicular A, Vehicular B, and Pedestrian B channel models.