As the demand for higher transmission rates and spectral efficiency is steadily increasing, the research and development of novel mobile communication systems has gained momentum. This paper focuses on providing a comprehensive survey of research and development activities on fifth generation mobile communication systems in Japan. We try to survey a vast area of wireless communication systems and the developments that led to future 5G systems.

The 3GPP Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) system, as compared to the LTE system, is anticipated to include several new features and enhancements, such as the usage of channel bandwidth beyond 20 MHz (up 100 MHz), higher order multiple input multiple output (MIMO) for both downlink and uplink transmissions, larger capacity especially for cell edge user equipment, and voice over IP (VoIP) users, and wider coverage and etc. This paper presents some key enabling technologies including flexible uplink access schemes, advanced uplink MIMO receiver designs, cell search, adaptive hybrid ARQ, and multi-resolution MIMO precoding, for the LTE-A system.

The downlink (base-to-mobile) bit error rate (BER) performance for a mobile user with relatively weak received signal in a multicarrier-CDMA (MC-CDMA) cellular system can be improved by utilizing the site diversity reception. With joint use of MMSE-based frequency domain equalization (FDE) and antenna diversity combining, the site diversity operation will increase the downlink capacity. In this paper, an expression for the theoretical conditional BER for the given set of channel gains is derived based on Gaussian approximation of the interference components. The local average BER is then obtained by averaging the conditional BER over the given set of channel gains using Monte-Carlo numerical method. The outage probability is measured from the numerically obtained cumulative distribution of the local average BER to determine the downlink capacity. Results from theoretical computation are compared to the results from computer simulation and discussed.

In downlink MC-CDMA, orthogonal variable spreading factor (OVSF) codes can be used to allow multirate communications while maintaining the orthogonality among the users with different data rates. In this paper, we point out that simple selection of the OVSF codes results in degraded performance. We show that this happens because simple code selection results in power concentration over certain consecutive subcarriers; severe power loss in the received signal occurs when these subcarriers experience a deep fade in a frequency selective fading channel. In addition, we show two effective techniques to avoid the performance degradation: random code selection and frequency interleaving; which technique provides a better performance depends on modulation level, code multiplexing order, and presence of channel coding.

The 3GPP LTE-Advanced has been attracting much attention recently, where the channel bandwidth would be beyond the maximum bandwidth of LTE, 20 MHz. In LTE, single carrier-frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) was accepted as the uplink access scheme due to its advantage of very low cubic metric (CM). For LTE-A wideband transmission, multicarrier access would be more effective than single carrier access to make use of multi-user diversity and can maintain the physical channel structure of LTE, where the control information is transmitted on the edges of each 20 MHz. In this paper, we discuss the access schemes in bandwidth under 20 MHz as well as over 20 MHz. In the case of bandwidth under 20 MHz, we propose the access schemes allowing discontinuous resource allocation to enhance average throughput while maintaining cell-edge user throughput, that is, DFT-spread-OFDM with spectrum division control (SDC) and adaptive selection of SC-FDMA and OFDM (SC+OFDM). The number of discontinuous spectrums is denoted as spectrum division (SD). For DFT-S-OFDM, we define a parameter max SD as the upper limit of SD. We evaluate our proposed schemes in bandwidth under 20 MHz and find that SC+OFDM as well as SDC with common max SD or UE-specific max SD can improve average throughput while their cell-edge user throughput can approach that of SC-FDMA. In the case of bandwidth over 20 MHz, we consider key factors to decide a feasible access scheme for aggregating several 20 MHz-wide bands.

Similar to direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA), site diversity can be applied to a multicarrier-CDMA (MC-CDMA) cellular system to improve the bit error rate (BER) performance for a user with weak received signal power, thus resulting in an increased link capacity. In this paper, the downlink site diversity reception using frequency-domain equalization based on minimum mean square error (MMSE) is considered for a MC-CDMA cellular system. A set of active base stations to be involved in the site diversity operation is determined based on the received signal power measurement by a mobile station. Downlink capacity with site diversity is evaluated by computer simulation. The impacts of path loss exponent and shadowing loss standard deviation on the site diversity effect are discussed. Furthermore, the performance improvement by antenna diversity reception is discussed.