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 subcarriers (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 numberof 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 frequency 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), orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), carrier frequency offset (CFO), intercarrier interference (ICI), filter bank multicarrier (FBMC).