Despite shifting towards mm-wave bands, the sub-6 GHz band will continue to be a fundamental spectral band in 5G. However, the severe congestion in this band makes a well-constrained spectrum a critical requirementof 5G. A well-constrained spectrum means that the communications regimes should dwell within their dedicated spectral bands and do not interfere with other systems working on neighboring bands. Consequently, the communi-cations community seeks convenient modulation schemes.

The 5G standards have already defined cyclic prefix orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CP-OFDM) as the modulation scheme for most of the sub-6 GHz band. However, the high out-of-band (OOB) emission phe-nomenon in OFDM is unfavorable for some regimes operating in 5G. Therefore, to legitimize OFDM in all 5G regimes, we need to suppress the OFDM OOB emission.

Since the discontinuous nature of the OFDM signal is the main reason forthe high OOB emission, one solution is to render the discontinuous OFDM signal continuous. Two factors control this discontinuity: the physical shape of the modulated signal and the correlation of the data symbols that modulate the OFDM signal.

While most traditional approaches focus on reshaping the OFDM signal to render it continuous, in this work, we give our attention to the spectral precoding approaches. These approaches manipulate the correlation of the data symbols to control the high OOB emission in OFDM.

After almost ten years of analytical and theoretical study of the spectralprecoding approaches in the literature, we believe it is time to investigate the practicality and ability of spectral precoding methods to compete with traditional approaches. Consequently, we check whether spectral precoding satisfies the spectral requirements of LTE measures. We analyze the precoders' implementation complexity and provide methodologies to reduce it. We design practical spectral precoders that match with the practical OFDM transmitters, and we study spectral precoding extensibility toward MIMO (and massive MIMO) systems.

Moreover, in this work, we introduce the first proof-of-concept prototype of spectrally precoded OFDM. In the prototype, we use software-defined radios (SDRs) to perform a real-time examination of how spectral precoding improves the spectral containment of OFDM systems.