On efficient burst truncation in FBMC-OQAM through virtual symbols

The paper considers the problem of burst truncation in FBMC-OQAM, which is strictly related to what is usually considered an important limit of this system: the tails at the beginning and at the end of the transmitted burst. Although the greatest part of the comparisons appeared in the literature among the different proposals for possible transceiver systems do not consider the introduction of burst truncation in FBMC-OQAM system, its spectral efficiency can be improved by careful use of the methods already proposed in the literature. This paper is dedicated to one of the most important methods already proposed in the literature that resorts to the use of virtual symbols in order to introduce an additive signal on the transmitted burst that does not introduce interference at the receiver but it is able to reduce the energy of the tails of the transmitted burst, limiting the relative interference levels. This method is considered in order to simplify its implementation and to provide a complete analysis of its performance. It is also analyzed how the presence of a near-far effect of the time-adjacent burst transmitters deteriorates the advantages of the method and affects the setting of the virtual symbols to be used. The results show that the considered burst truncation method allows a non negligible increase in the number of transmitted information symbols and makes the FBMCOQAM system particularly competitive when operating with limited resources dedicated to multiple access control and with a limited number of subcarriers per block.