A Performance Comparison between Oversampled Filter Banks and the 3GPP Long Term Evolution

Recent attention is being paid in the field of wireless communications to the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard developed by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). The LTE downlink uses an efficient transmission scheme called orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). Despite many advantages to OFDM, the system suffers from poor stopband attenuation, making it susceptible to inter-carrier interference (ICI). This thesis presents a multicarrier system based on oversampled filter banks (OFB) that is comparable to LTE in terms of occupied bandwidth and symbol transmission rate while achieving superior stopband attenuation and subcarrier separation. In addition, a new treatment of the LTE pilot symbol configuration is proposed that simplifies the interpolation process.

Using the new pilot symbol treatment, the channel equalization performance of the two systems will be measured using the 1-tap equalizer through symbol error rate (SER) curves. The channel estimation process uses two different estimation and interpolation techniques. An initial channel estimate is obtained using the least squares (LS) estimator or the normalized least mean squared (NLMS) algorithm, and the full estimate is obtained using linear or cubic spline interpolation between pilot symbols. The goal is to provide a performance evaluation of oversampled filter banks in comparison to the LTE standard.