To fulfil the requirements of 5G vision of
“everything everywhere and always connected”, a new waveform
must contain the features to support a greater number of users on
high data rate. Although Orthogonal Frequency Division
Multiplexing (OFDM) has been widely used in the 4th generation,
but it can hardly meet the needs of 5G vision. However, many
waveforms have been proposed to cope with new challenges. In
this paper, we have presented a comparative analysis of several
waveform candidates (FBMC, GFDM, UFMC, F-OFDM) on the
basis of complexity, hardware design and other valuable
characteristics. Filter based waveforms have much better Out of
Band Emission (OoBE) as compared to OFDM. However, FOFDM
has smaller filter length compared to filter-based
waveforms and provides better transmission with multiple
antenna system without any extra processing, while providing
flexible frequency multiplexing, shorter latency and relaxed
synchronization as compared to other waveforms.