Pre-processing based soft-demapper for per-tone MIMO operation in QAM-FBMC systems

As a promising candidate to replace cyclic prefixed orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CP-OFDM), a new quadrature amplitude modulation filter-bank multi-carrier (QAM-FBMC) has been proposed for enabling spectral efficiency increase and spectrum confinement while keeping near orthogonality. QAM transmission can combat intrinsic interference of conventional offset-QAM (OQAM)-FBMC, which is main bottleneck in channel estimator and multiple antenna transceiver design. Compared to existing single filter based QAM-FBMC, the new QAM-FBMC has more optimization freedom in multiple prototype filters to increase self signal-to-interference ratio (SIR). In this paper, the possibility of per-tone multiple input multiple output (MIMO) reception in the new QAM-FBMC system is exploited. Our MIMO receiver is constructed with per-tone MIMO equalization in oversampled signal domain and its soft-demapper in symbol domain. Not only the separate log likelihood ratio (LLR) calculation per stream but also joint LLR calculation (i.e., soft maximum likelihood (ML) detection) is implemented with pre-processing. Simulation results show that the per-tone MIMO reception in QAM-FBMC is comparable to that of CP-OFDM.