Multi-antenna GFDM for resilient decentralized communications

Owing to the superior performance of generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM), in terms of enhanced spectral efficiency and lower out-of-band radiations, it is considered as a potential replacement of traditional orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for next generation wireless communication systems. However, non-orthogonal pulse shaping in GFDM gives rise to intrinsic self-interference complicating the receiver design. Moreover, its extension to multi-input multi-output (MIMO) designs for spatial diversity and enhanced reliability is also not straightforward as overlapping of transmitted symbols in time and frequency hinders the extension of conventional diversity techniques to MIMO GFDM. In this work, we consider a multi-antenna GFDM decentralized communication system and present a generic framework to achieve spatial transmit diversity along with a low complexity transceiver design. We extend our proposal by presenting a novel multi-antenna preamble that helps not only in acquisition of robust time and frequency synchronization but also in reliable estimation of time-varying frequency selective channels. Performance evaluation over realistic 3GPP simulation scenarios, confirms the attainment of full diversity order along with superior preamble-based time–frequency synchronization and channel estimation performance as compared to state of the art.