Achievable Rate Upper-Bounds of Uplink Multiuser OTFS Transmissions

The orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation has emerged as a promising modulation scheme for high mobility wireless communications. To enable efficient OTFS detection in the delay-Doppler (DD) domain, the DD domain channels need to be acquired accurately. To achieve the low latency requirement in future wireless communications, the time duration of the OTFS block should be small, therefore fractional Doppler shifts have to be considered to avoid significant modelling errors due to the assumption of integer Doppler shifts. However there lack investigations on the estimation of OTFS channels with fractional Doppler shifts in the literature. In this work, we develop a channel estimator for OTFS with particular attention to fractional Doppler shifts, and both bi-orthogonal waveform and rectangular waveform are considered. Instead of estimating the DD domain channel directly, we estimate the channel gains and (fractional) Doppler shifts that parameterize the DD domain channel. The estimation is formulated as a structured sparse signal recovery problem with a Bayesian treatment. Based on a factor graph representation of the problem, an efficient message passing algorithm is developed to recover the structured sparse signal (thereby the OTFS channel). The Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) for the estimation is developed and the effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated through simulations.

This paper proposes an off-grid channel estimation scheme for orthogonal time-frequency space (OTFS) systems adopting the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) framework. To avoid channel spreading caused by the fractional delay and Doppler shifts and to fully exploit the channel sparsity in the delay-Doppler (DD) domain, we estimate the original DD domain channel response rather than the effective DD domain channel response as commonly adopted in the literature. The OTFS channel estimation problem is formulated as an off-grid sparse signal recovery problem based on a virtual sampling grid defined in the DD space, where the on-grid and off-grid components of the delay and Doppler shifts are separated for estimation. In particular, the on-grid components of the delay and Doppler shifts are jointly determined by the entry indices with significant values in the recovered sparse vector. Then, the corresponding off-grid components are modeled as hyper-parameters in the proposed SBL framework, which can be estimated via the expectation-maximization method. Simulation results verify that compared with the on-grid approach, our proposed off-grid OTFS channel estimation scheme enjoys a 1.5 dB lower normalized mean square error.

Orthogonal Time Frequency Space (OTFS) is a two-dimensional modulation technique designed in the delay-Doppler (DD) domain. Each symbol experiences a sparse channel with low variability in the DD domain rather than the time-varying multi-path channel in conventional orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems. In practical applications, fractional Doppler shifts is unavoidable due to the limited frame duration. Channel dispersion caused by fractional Doppler shifts makes the channel estimation more difficult and causes data aliasing. In this paper, we propose an adaptive scheme to reduce fractional Doppler shifts. Doppler shift compensation is performed on time-domain signals and the number of time-domain symbols is changed to approximate the quantized Doppler shifts integers. With the proposed adaptive scheme, the overhead of the reference signal can be significantly reduced with the fractional Doppler shifts eliminated. Simulation results show that block error rate performance is not degraded and system throughput is improved with the proposed scheme.

Orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation is often declared to be superior to its direct concurrent, i.e., orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation. However, the comparison is often performed under favorable conditions for OTFS as, for instance, the assumption of extremely high Doppler shifts and/or the approximation of delay and Doppler shifts to be integer multiples of the Doppler-delay resolution of OTFS modulation. In order to provide a fair comparison, this paper addresses a comparison in terms of the information-theoretic achievable rate under practical separate detection and decoding, explicitly considering the pilot overhead necessary to acquire the channel state information, the accuracy of the channel estimation, and any other possible additional loss. We do not claim to establish in a definitive way which is the best modulation format, since the choice thereof depends on many other features which are outside the scope of this work (e.g., legacy, intellectual property, ease and know-how for implementation, and many other criteria). Nevertheless, we provide the foundations to properly compare multi-carrier communication systems in terms of their information theoretic achievable rate potential, within meaningful and sensible assumptions on the channel models and on the receiver complexity (both in terms of channel estimation and in terms of soft-output symbol detection).

In this study, the authors propose a cyclic prefix (CP) based imperfect reconstruction (IPR) filter bank multicarrier (FBMC) system in the uplink of multiuser networks, known as filter bank multiple access (FBMA). The prototype filter in the system is a common low‐pass filter without any perfect reconstruction (PR) or nearly perfect reconstruction (NPR) constraint. CP appended input signal format is applied to avoid inter‐symbol interference and facilitate the equalisation task. The received signal is jointly processed by multi‐subband equalisation. Besides, the input data symbols can be complex‐valued due to IPR design. Some properties and achievable data rate of the proposed system are discussed. Simulations illustrate that the proposed system with uniformly/non‐uniformly designed filter bank has a similar achievable data rate to orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). Bit error rate performance of the proposed system is better than OFDMA and an error floor always exists when applying conventional PR FBMC to multi‐user networks. In addition, OFDMA is more sensitive to carrier frequency offset than FBMA because of full synchronisation requirement. Therefore, it suggests that the proposed CP based IPR FBMA system works well without PR/NPR conditions and more extensive development is feasible for the filter banks in the foreseeable future.

Known as a new promising waveform modulation technique, the orthogonal time-frequency space (OTFS) technique is considered a very important waveform modulation technique that modulates data in the delay-Doppler (DD) domain. The key difference between OTFS and the traditional multiplexing techniques is that it is two-dimensional modulation that converts between the time-frequency (TF) domain and delay-Doppler domain, these features enable dealing with the Doppler shift generated from high mobility objects which were ignored in the traditional modulation techniques such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). The main objective of this survey is to provide an overview of this novel subject indicating its system model. Also, we review the main topics related to OTFS modulation as data detection techniques, channel estimation, MIMO, and multiuser systems. Then, the main research direction of OTFS on future wireless generation systems is given.

OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) is a well-known multicarrier modulation technique that allows high-rate data transmissions over multipath broadband wireless channels. By usingOFDM, a high-rate data stream is split into a number of lower-rate streams that are simultaneously transmitted on different orthogonal subcarriers. Thus, the broadband channel is decomposed into a set of parallel frequency-flat subchannels; each one corresponding to an OFDM subcarrier. In a single user scenario, if the channel state is known at the transmitter, the system performance can be enhanced by adapting the power and data rates over each subcarrier. For example, the transmitter can allocate more transmit power and higher data rates to the subcarriers with better channels. By doing this, the total throughput can be significantly increased. In a multiuser scenario, different subcarriers can be allocated to different users, which constitutes an orthogonal multiple access method known as OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access). OFDMA is one of the principal multiple access schemes for broadband wireless multiuser systems. It has being proposed for use in several broadband multiuser wireless standards like IEEE 802.20 (MBWA: http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/20/), IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX: http://www.ieee802.org/16/, 2011) and 3GPP-LTE (http://www.3gpp.org/). This chapter focuses on the OFDMA broadcast channel (also known as downlink channel), since this is typically where high data rates and reliability is needed in broadband wireless multiuser systems. In OFDMA downlink transmission, each subchannel is assigned to one user at most, allowing simultaneous orthogonal transmission to several users. Once a subchannel is assigned to a user, the transmitter allocates a fraction of the total available power as well as a modulation and coding (data rate). If the channel state is known at the transmitter, the system performance can be significantly enhanced by allocating the available resources (subchannels, transmit power and data rates) intelligently according to the users’ channels. The allocation of these resources determines the quality of service (QoS) provided by the system to each user. Since different users experience different channels, this scheme does not only exploit the frequency diversity of the channel, but also the inherent multiuser diversity of the system. In multiuser transmission schemes, like OFDMA, the information-theoretic system performance is usually characterized by the capacity region. It is defined as the set of rates 6

In the planning of cellular networks, link budget calculation is the first step to get the maximum allowable cell radius that guarantees a target signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) with a certain level of outage probability at the cell border. The interference margin as one of key inputs for link budget is used to compensate for co-channel interference. In this paper, a mathematical analysis for interference margin as a function of system load is proposed in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) cellular networks. The analysis is derived from OFDMA features based on a general expression of exponential effective SINR mapping (EESM). The proposed approach can be easily applied to the evaluation of interference from neighboring cells, and help to improve the accuracy of the link budget calculation in OFDMA systems. All the theoretical analysis given in this paper have been proved by Monte Carlo simulations.

In this dissertation, new vehicular communication (V2V, V2X) scenarios are going to be studied. Under this context, against common and well known radar systems, new joint radar and communications techniques are taking part of the current literature. These system are mainly focused on the transmission of useful information towards the targets, which are, thus, not only “passively” detected, and a single equipment is able to perform both operational modes, avoiding to split the functionalities between two distinct subsystems (with increased cost and complexity). The choice of the multi-carrier modulation for joint radar and communication falls into two distinct waveforms, i.e., orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation and orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation. OFDM is the most popular multi-carrier modulation of recent years, widely studied and standardized in most of the current communication standards, including 5G. The motivation of this choice is simple: thanks to the application of a cyclic prefix between symbols, i.e., a guard interval to prevent inter-symbol interference, and under the assumption of absence of inter-carrier interference, which holds under reasonable amount of the Doppler effect and subcarrier spacing, the communication channel can be diagonalized and symbol-by-symbol detection performed. Clearly, the appealing simplicity of detection makes OFDM the best choice for modern digital communications. On the other hand, OTFS is a modulation waveform with two big differences with respect to its direct competitor. First, it does not necessitate the insertion of the cyclic prefix, achieving a better communications rate, i.e., more information is sent over a time-frequency window, but at the cost of a more complex detection approach, working blockwise and not symbol-by-symbol. Second, OTFS is not sensitive to delay and Doppler shifts, meaning that its performance is kept constant whatever the distance and the speed between transmitter and (target) receiver. This feature is very appealing for joint radar and communication tasks, being the scenario very dynamical, with possible remarkable Doppler shifts and delays, increased by considering the round-trip time between radar transmitter and target. Based on the aforementioned analysis, in this dissertation we take care of a fair comparison between the two digital modulation formats, from the point of view of radar, parameter estimation, achievable communication rate, channel estimation, and more other tasks, to determine their positive and negative aspects, such that a system designer is able to choose the most suitable waveform for a given scenario or application.

One of the major drawbacks of the orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) system is the multi-user interference (MUI) induced by the carrier frequency offsets (CFOs). In sub-band based OFDMA systems, users occupy consecutive and non-overlapping frequency sub-bands. The pilots are usually placed on the edges of a sub-band for channel estimation. However, the channel estimation performance is seriously degraded by the MUI. Traditionally, the MUI is alleviated by inserting a guard sub-carrier between adjacent users. In this paper, a novel pilot architecture is proposed, where three pilots are placed on each edge of a sub-band and pilots of adjacent users are overlapped. The proposed architecture has the same bandwidth efficiency as that of the conventional guard sub-carrier insertion scheme and provides better channel estimation performance and MUI reduction.

Orthogonal time-frequency space (OTFS) is a two-dimensional (2D) modulation technology for processing high mobility communication signals. The integer delay and Doppler shifts can lead to significant modeling error in the delay-Doppler (DD) domain. To obtain accurate estimation of fractional DD domain channel, we propose a novel two-step off-grid channel estimation using Bayesian compressive sensing (BCS) for OTFS systems. First, we analyze the vectorized form of fractional DD domain input-output relationship and derive a simplified expression form to adapt compressive sensing model. Then, to tackle the problem of fractional parameters estimation, we build an off-grid compressive model in light of high-order Taylor expansion. The channel parameters can be obtained by our proposed off-grid BCS (OG-BCS) algorithm, where we edge out the noise parameters and adopt a hierarchical Laplacian scale mixture (LSM) prior for OTFS signal. At the same time, based on likelihood maximization we derive the off-grid update expressions and incorporate it into our optimized BCS framework. To further reduce the computational complexity, we propose a fast BCS (FBCS) algorithm via LSM prior. In our proposed FBCS algorithm, the hyper-parameters modeling the sparse signal are separated for calculation, and only a single hyper-parameter is considered for updating in each iteration. Specially, we analyze the condition of maximization for obtaining the solution of hyper-parameters and derive its update expressions. Simulation results illustrate that our proposed algorithm has better computational efficiency and precise channel estimation performance.

In this study, the physical layer resource allocation in orthogonal frequency‐division multiple access (OFDMA) systems is studied by considering the non‐linear effects of power amplifier (PA). The non‐linearity produces cross‐correlation among the subcarriers and results in deteriorating the OFDMA subcarriers orthogonality. Hence, the signal‐to‐interference ratio (SIR) of the output signal of PA for OFDMA signal with different power scaling factors for subcarriers is derived. Then, the theoretical SIR is verified by simulation result. Next, the optimisation problem is designed to maximise the total achievable downlink rate of all users by assigning subcarriers and power scaling factors. This non‐convex problem is solved by comprehensive learning particle swarm optimisation. The simulation results show that when PA is non‐linear, better total rate is achieved by considering non‐linearity in resource allocation compared with the conventional resource allocation techniques.

In uplink orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA), carrier frequency offsets (CFO) and/or timing offsets (TO) of other users with respect to a desired user can cause significant multiuser interference (MUI). In this paper, we derive analytical bit error rate (BER) expressions that quantify the degradation of BER due to the combined effect of both CFOs as well as TOs; such an analytical BER derivation has not been reported so far for uplink OFDMA in the presence of CFOs and TOs. For the case when the desired user is perfectly frequency/time aligned (and other users have non-zero CFOs/TOs), we obtain an exact closed-form expression for the BER. For the case when the desired user also has non-zero CFO/TO, we obtain an approximate BER expression involving a single integral. Analytical and simulation results are shown to match quite well.

In this paper, the performance of parallel interference cancellation (PIC) multi-user detectors in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) mobile communication systems is investigated. In multi-user systems, the multi-user interference (MUI) degraded the system performance, especially in near-far effect environments. An adaptive weight partial PIC (AWPPIC) scheme is proposed to reduce the MUIs and to improve the bit error rate (BER) performance for uplink OFDMA systems. Simulation results show that under the near far problems for block sub carrier assignment (BCA) scheme, the AWPPIC scheme can improve the BER performance no matter what the system load is.

In this paper we present a two-dimensional medium access control (MAC) protocol. Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) can make multiple stations (STA) transmit simultaneously on different sub-channels. On the other hand, carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) could make different stations contend the available channel from the time domain to avoid collision with each other. We propose a two-dimensional MAC protocol based on OFDMA and CSMA/CA in broadband systems. With the new designed MAC protocol different stations will access the channel from the time-frequency domain without interference and collision. The combination of OFDMA with CSMA/CA will improve the system throughput with efficient MAC and decrease the collision probability. We design that different stations will contend the available time-frequency resources dynamically under fairness. The system throughput of the designed protocol is analyzed and simulation results are presented to show the performance under our designed protocol far better than the conventional CSMA/CA protocol.