Unified Performance Assessment of OFDM, FBMC, F-OFDM, GFDM and UFMC Waveforms

Air-interface designs for fifth-generation (5G) and early sixth-generation (6G) networks must operate reliably across fragmented spectrum, dissimilar service profiles, tight latency budgets and multipath channels. Although cyclic prefix-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CP-OFDM) remains the baseline waveform in 5G New Radio (NR), many alternative multicarrier schemes rely on mismatched numerologies or idealised assumptions, limiting their value for practical system design. This study presents a unified and reproducible assessment of OFDM, filter bank multicarrier (FBMC), filtered OFDM (F-OFDM), generalised frequency division multiplexing (GFDM) and universal filtered multicarrier (UFMC) within a transmitter-channel-receiver framework using an NR-like 20 MHz configuration with a 30.72 MHz sampling rate, FFT/IFFT size M=2048, 1200 active subcarriers and cyclic prefix operation for OFDM-like schemes. The analysis combines structural overhead, transient behaviour and arithmetic complexity evaluations with Monte Carlo simulations of power spectral density, bit error rate and peak-to-average power ratio under additive white Gaussian noise, flat Rayleigh fading and the standardised 3GPP TDL-C channel model. Results show that FBMC achieves the strongest spectral confinement, F-OFDM and UFMC provide the best trade-off between spectral containment and implementation continuity, and GFDM offers block-level flexibility at the cost of higher receiver sensitivity. Overall, no single waveform is universally optimal, supporting scenario-driven waveform selection for 5G evolution and early-6G radio interfaces.