Three 5G enabling technologies, i.e, sparse code multiple access (SCMA), Polar codes and filtered OFDM (f-OFDM), are implemented into a massive MIMO system in the field trial conducted by HUAWEI and NTT DOCOMO to investigate their impacts on the system spectral efficiency. Taking massive MIMO with OFDMA and Turbo codes as the baseline, we observe about 30% downlink spectral efficiency improvement in the trial. Results from test field are summarized and analyzed in this paper, which verified that SCMA, Polar codes and f- OFDM are also feasible for massive MIMO systems in terms of spectral efficiency improvement.

Spectral efficiency is always a key factor to be improved and optimized along mobile communication networks evolving generation by generation. 5G enabling technologies must take spectral efficiency into consideration. In this paper, we show the performance of three key 5G technologies in sense of spectral efficiency improvement. Sparse code multiple access, polar codes, and filtered orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing are novel multiple access technology, channel coding scheme, and waveform, respectively. The combination of them is implemented in a 5G field trial testbed by NTT DOCOMO and Huawei for the first time. According to the field test results, we achieve over 100% spectral efficiency improvement comparison with baseline, where orthogonal frequency-division multiple access and turbo coding as LTE are used.