On the cyclostationarity of Universal Filtered Multi-Carrier UFMC

In order to meet the explosion of connected devices with their heterogeneous applications, the upcoming 5G systems focus on the design of spectrally efficient waveforms. Universal Filtered Multicarrier (UFMC) is one of the major waveforms contenders that offers low out of band emissions, compatibility with the existing Multiple Input Multiple Output techniques as well as multiple services support. In this paper, we propose to couple UFMC with Cognitive Radio (CR) to make better use of the available spectral resources. To perform spectrum sensing for the CR, we rely on cyclostationary detection. UFMC cyclostationarity characteristics have not been researched before. Hence in the present work, we first derive the explicit theoretical m-th order cyclic cumulants of UFMC, considering a multipath channel, frequency and timing offsets. Our analysis reveals that the per-subband filtering used in this waveform produces distinctive cyclostationary signatures. Then we exploit these signatures for signal detection. The obtained results are compared to those of the well studied Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). Detection probability of UFMC outperforms the one of OFDM specially when the used Cyclic Prefix (CP) is low.