To achieve the extreme high data rate and extreme coverage extension requirements of 6G wireless communication, new spectrum in sub-THz (100-300GHz) and non-terrestrial network (NTN) are two of the macro trends of 6G candidate technologies, respectively. However, non-linearity of power amplifiers (PA) is a critical challenge for both sub-THz and NTN. Therefore, high power efficiency (PE) or low peak to average power ratio (PAPR) waveform design becomes one of the most significant 6G research topics. Meanwhile, high spectral efficiency (SE) and low out-of-band emission (OOBE) are still important key performance indicators (KPIs) for 6G waveform design. Single-carrier waveform discrete Fourier transform spreading orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DFT-s-OFDM) has achieved many research interests due to its high PE, and it has been supported in 5G New Radio (NR) when uplink coverage is limited. So DFT-s-OFDM can be regarded as a candidate waveform for 6G. Many enhancement schemes based on DFT-s-OFDM have been proposed, including null cyclic prefix (NCP)/unique word (UW), frequency-domain spectral shaping (FDSS), and time-domain compression and expansion (TD-CE), etc. However, there is no unified framework to be compatible with all the enhancement schemes. This paper firstly provides a general description of the 6G candidate waveforms based on DFT-s-OFDM enhancement. Secondly, the more flexible TD-CE supporting methods for unified non-orthogonal waveform (uNOW) are proposed and discussed. Thirdly, a unified waveform framework based on DFT-s-OFDM structure is proposed. By designing the pre-processing and post-processing modules before and after DFT in the unified waveform framework, the three technical methods (NCP/UW, FDSS, and TD-CE) can be integrated to improve three KPIs of DFT-s-OFDM simultaneously with high flexibility. Then the implementation complexity of the 6G candidate waveforms are analyzed and compared. Performance of different DFT-s-OFDM enhancement schemes is investigated by link level simulation, which reveals that uNOW can achieve the best PAPR performance among all the 6G candidate waveforms. When considering PA back-off, uNOW can achieve 124% throughput gain compared to traditional DFT-s-OFDM.

The newly proposed orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) system exhibits excellent error performance on high-Doppler fading channels. However, the rectangular prototype window function (PWF) inherent in OTFS leads to high out-of-band emission (OOBE), which reduces the spectral efficiency in multi-user scenarios. To this end, this paper presents an OTFS system based on bi-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OTFS-BFDM) modulation. In OTFS-BFDM systems, PWFs with bi-orthogonal properties can be optimized to provide lower OOBE than OTFS, which is a special case with rectangular PWF. We further derive that the OTFS-BFDM system is sparsely-connected so that the low-complexity message passing (MP) decoding algorithm can be adopted. Moreover, the power spectral density, peak to average power ratio (PAPR) and bit error rate (BER) of the OTFS-BFDM system with different PWFs are compared. Simulation results show that: i) the use of BFDM modulation significantly inhibits the OOBE of OTFS system; ii) the better the frequency-domain localization of PWFs, the smaller the BER and PAPR of OTFS-BFDM system.

A variety of all-new systems such as a massive machine type communication (mMTC) system will be supported in 5G and beyond. Although each mMTC device occupies quite narrow bandwidth, the massive number of devices expected will generate a vast array of traffic and consume enormous spectrum resources. Therefore, it is necessary to proactively gather up and exploit fractional spectrum resources including guard bands that are secured but unused by the existing Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems. The guard band is originally secured as a margin for high out-of-band emission (OOBE) caused by the discontinuity between successive symbols in the cyclic prefix-based orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CP-OFDM), and new-waveforms enabling high OOBE suppression have been widely researched to efficiently allocate narrowband communication to the frequency gap. Time-domain windowing is a well-known signal processing technique for reducing OOBE with low complexity and a universal time-domain windowed OFDM (UTW-OFDM) with a long transition duration exceeding the CP length has demonstrated its ability in WLAN-based systems. In this paper, we apply UTW-OFDM to the LTE downlink system and comprehensively evaluate its performance under the channel models defined by 3GPP. Specifically, we evaluate OOBE reduction and block error rate (BLER) by computer simulation and clarify how far OOBE can be reduced without degrading communication quality. Furthermore, we estimate the implementation complexity of the proposed UTW-OFDM, the conventional CP-OFDM, and the universal filtered-OFDM (UF-OFDM) by calculating the number of required multiplications. These evaluation and estimation results demonstrate that the proposed UTW-OFDM is a practical new-waveform applicable to the 5G and beyond.

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals suffer nonlinear distortion within the transmitter, in the high-power amplifiers in particular. This paper proposes a nonlinear distortion compensation technique for OFDM signals, which incorporates a baseband predistortion with a constant peak-power OFDM (CP-OFDM). CP-OFDM fixes the envelope-peak amplitude to a constant value while maintaining the linearity of the inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) outputs; consequently, the baseband predistorter entirely compensates the nonlinear distortion. Simulation and experimental results verify that the proposed technique significantly reduces out-of-band power emission and adjacent channel interference (ACI) more than 10 dB respectively.