Block Scalable OFDM-Based Waveform for NTN Uplink–A Comparative Study of Multiple Candidate Waveforms Over NTN Scenarios Using NR Numerology

Non terrestrial network (NTN) has been regarded as an important component of beyond 5G communication. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has officially started studies on NTN for the purpose of integrating satellites with New Radio (NR) terrestrial networks. However, the NR defined orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) waveform is susceptible to doubly selective fading and nonlinear distortions in the NTN uplink, thus leading to severe performance loss. In this paper, a type of block scalable OFDM (BS-OFDM) waveform is proposed, which has modified subcarrier and sub-symbol segmentation when compared to the conventional NR defined OFDM. With our proposed framework, block scalable discrete Fourier transform spread OFDM (BS-DFT-s-OFDM) and block scalable orthogonal time frequency space (BS-OTFS) can also be implemented. To obtain a comprehensive understanding of different waveforms, performance metrics concerning peak to average power ratio (PAPR), total degradation (TD), bit error rate (BER), and complexity are presented. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed block scalable waveforms can obtain better performance and lower complexity than existing NR waveforms in different NTN uplink scenarios, and can therefore be promising candidate waveforms for NR NTN.