A Non-orthogonal Waveform Design with Iterative Detection and Decoding for Narrowband IoT Applications

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) was proposed by 3GPP in Release 13 to provide low power wide area connections to a high-volume of devices. With the millions of devices expected to connect to 5G through its massive machine-type communication use case, the strict orthogonality and synchronization requirement of cyclic-prefix orthogonal division multiplexing (CP-OFDM) will demand a very large amount of control information between devices and the core network. To overcome this challenge, we study a new air interface for NB-IoT, which utilizes a non-orthogonal multicarrier transmission scheme. The waveform considered in this work is filter-bank muilticarrier with quadrature amplitude modulation (FBMC-QAM). The loss of orthogonality in FBMC-QAM results in severe levels of intrinsic interference. Iterative detection and decoding (IDD) using low density parity check (LDPC) encoding and decoding is implemented together with iterative interference cancellation (IIC) to remove the inherent interference and improve the BER rate performance. Simulation results indicate that the proposed IDD receiver can effectively improve BER performance under time-varying channels.