Abstract—In this paper, we propose a multi-carrier
transmission scheme to overcome the problem of intercarrier interference (ICI) in orthogonal frequency division
multiplexing (OFDM) systems. In the proposed scheme,
called universal-filtered multi-carrier (UFMC), a filtering
operation is applied to a group of consecutive subcar-
riers (e.g. a given allocation of a single user) in order
to reduce out-of-band sidelobe levels and subsequently
minimize the potential ICI between adjacent users in case
of asynchronous transmissions. We consider a coordinated
multi-point (CoMP) reception technique, where a number
of base stations (BSs) send the received signals from user
equipments (UEs) to a CoMP central unit (CCU) for
joint detection and processing. We examine the impact
of carrier frequency offset (CFO) on the performance
of the proposed scheme and compare the results with
the performance of cyclic prefix based orthogonal fre-
quency division multiplexing (CP-OFDM) systems. We use
computer experiments to illustrate the efficiency of the
proposed multi-carrier scheme. The results indicate that
the UFMC scheme outperforms the OFDM for both perfect
and non-perfect frequency synchronization between the
UEs and BSs.
Index Terms—Coordinated multipoint (CoMP), orthog-
onal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), carrier
frequency offset (CFO), intercarrier interference (ICI),
filter bank multicarrier (FBMC).