Evaluation of 5G Waveform Candidates Considering Hardware Impairments and above 6 GHz Operation

Frequency bands above 6GHz are receiving great attention for 5G mobile radio communications due to the potential availability of enormous channel bandwidths. Various multi-carrier and single-carrier waveforms are being considered as potential candidates for 5G radio interface. When evaluating the waveform performance at high carrier frequency and large bandwidths, the inclusion of realistic hardware impairments is of great importance. In this paper, various 5G candidate waveforms (OFDM, DFTS-OFDM, W/P-OFDM, UF-OFDM, FBMC) are evaluated under hardware impairments (i.e., oscillator phase noise and non-linear amplifier) for above 6GHz mobile communications. It is observed that low out-of-band emission advantage of frequency localized waveforms (W/P-OFDM, UF-OFDM, FBMC) over OFDM and DFTS-OFDM may degrade or even vanish when hardware impairments are considered.