Theoretical BER Analysis for FBMC/QAM Signals

Filter bank multicarrier/quadrature amplitude modulation (FBMC/QAM) with two prototype filters has been studied as an alternative waveform for post-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) wireless communications. However, the analysis of its theoretical bit error rate (BER) is still missing in the literature, which motivates our work. In this paper, it is proved that the real and imaginary parts of the intrinsic interference are identically distributed in the FBMC/QAM system, and their discrete probability density functions (PDFs) are presented. Based on these new results, the closed-form BER expressions of FBMC/QAM are derived for AWGN, flat Rayleigh and frequency-selective Rayleigh channels. Numerical results demonstrate that the derived BER expressions match perfectly with the Monte Carlo simulations, except for the high SNR region of frequency-selective channels.