Spectral Efficiency Comparison of OFDM/FBMC for Uplink Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio (CR) is proposed to automatically detect and exploit unused spectrum while avoiding harmful interference to the incumbent system. In this paper, we emphasize the channel capacity comparison of a CR network using two types of multicarrier communications: conventional Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) with Cyclic Prefix (CP) and Filter Bank based MultiCarrier (FBMC) modulations. We use a resource allocation algorithm in which subcarrier assignment and power allocation are carried out sequentially. By taking the impact of Inter-Cell Interference (ICI) resulting from timing offset into account, the maximization of total information rates is formulated under an uplink scenario with pathloss and Rayleigh fading, subject to maximum power constraint as well as mutual interference constraint between primary user (PU) and secondary user (SU). Final simulation results show that FBMC can achieve higher channel capacity than OFDM because of the low spectral leakage of its prototype filter.