Zak-OTFS With Spread Carrier Waveforms

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Abstract
Zak-OTFS (orthogonal time frequency space) modulation is a communication framework that parameterizes the wireless channel in the delay-Doppler (DD) domain, where the parameters map directly to physical attributes of the scatterers that comprise the scattering environment. As a consequence, the channel can be efficiently acquired and equalized. The Zak-OTFS carrier is a pulse in the DD domain, and the Zak transform converts it to a pulse train modulated by a tone (pulsone) in the time domain. The pulsone waveform is localized rather than spread, and it suffers from high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). We describe how to transform the orthonormal basis of Zak-OTFS pulsones into an orthonormal basis of spread carrier waveforms with low PAPR (only 6.58 dB) that support communication in the presence of mobility and delay spread. This transformation is realized by a unitary transform based on the discrete affine Fourier transform. Unlike other spread modulations that achieve low PAPR by spreading information across a wider bandwidth (thus reducing the spectral efficiency), the proposed spread carrier-based Zak-OTFS achieves full spectral efficiency like pulsone-based Zak-OTFS, with 5.6 dB lower PAPR per basis element. We demonstrate uncoded bit error rate (BER) similar to pulsone-based Zak-OTFS, and improved BER performance over competing methods based on OFDM and OTFS in high mobility & delay spread environments.
Funding Information
  • National Science Foundation (2342690, 2148212)
  • Federal Agency and Industry Partners as specified in the Resilient & Intelligent NextG Systems (RINGS) Program;
  • Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA 8750-20-2-0504, FA 9550-23-1-0249)

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