A Comprehensive Survey of Candidate Waveforms for 5G, beyond 5G and 6G Wireless Communication Systems

The evolution of global mobile data over the past decades in broadcasting, Internet of Things (IoT), education, healthcare, commerce, and energy has put strong pressure on 3G/4G mobile networks to improve their service offerings. These generations of mobile networks were initially invented to meet the requirements of the above-mentioned applications. However, as the requirements in these applications continue to increase, new mobile technologies such as 5G (fifth generation), 5G and beyond (B5G, beyond fifth generation), and 6G (sixth generation) are still progressing and being experimented. These networks are very heterogeneous generations of mobile networks that will have to offer very high throughput per user, good energy efficiency, better traffic capacity per area, improved spectral efficiency, very low latency, and high mobility. To meet these requirements, the radio interface of future mobile networks will have to be flexible and rationalized the available frequency resources. Therefore, new modulation methods, access techniques and waveforms capable of supporting these technological changes are proposed. This review presents brief descriptions of the types of 5G, B5G, and 6G waveforms. The 5G consists of OFDM including its transmission techniques: generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM), filter bank based multi-carrier (FBMC), universal filtered multi-carrier (UFMC), and index modulation (IM). Meanwhile, the 6G covers orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS), orthogonal chirp division multiplexing (OCDM) and orthogonal time sequence multiplexing (OTSM). The networks’ potentialities, advantages, disadvantages, and future directions are outlined.