Compensating multiuser synchronization errors in 5G communications: The radio resource overhead

Multiple asynchronous devices, that exploit a pool of radio resources to communicate, form a key 5G communication scenario. Considering multicarrier transmission for this scenario, the expected multiuser synchronization errors at a receiving node, may be compensated by inserting guard subcarriers between transmissions from different devices. We analyze the radio resource overhead due to the use of guard subcarriers in correlation with the adopted multicarrier waveform and subcarrier allocation scheme. We show that Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) can hardly serve the aforementioned scenario, while, in general case the use of guard subcarriers introduces another strain on the resource allocation procedure, questioning the performance of resource allocators that in conventional scenarios are highly efficient.