Orthogonal Time Frequency Space (OTFS) Modulation Based Radar System

TL;DR

This paper introduces an OTFS-based radar system that enhances target detection and tracking by leveraging OTFS's robustness to Doppler effects, offering improved range, velocity estimation, and efficiency over traditional OFDM radar methods.

Contribution

It proposes a novel OTFS-based matched filter algorithm for radar, demonstrating advantages over OFDM in Doppler estimation, transmission efficiency, and target tracking capabilities.

Findings

OTFS-based radar achieves better Doppler tolerance.

The proposed algorithm improves target range and velocity estimation.

OTFS allows longer range and faster tracking than OFDM.

Abstract

Orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation was proposed to tackle the destructive Doppler effects in wireless communications, with potential applications to many other areas. In this paper, we investigate its application to radar systems, and propose a novel efficient OTFS-based matched filter algorithm for target range and velocity estimation. The proposed algorithm not only exhibits the inherent advantages due to multi-carrier modulation of the existing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM-) based radar algorithms but also provides additional benefits to improve radar capability. Similar to OFDM, OTFS spreads the transmitted signal in the entire time--frequency resources to exploit the full diversity gains for radar processing. However, OTFS requires less cyclic prefix, and hence, shorter transmission duration than OFDM, allowing longer range radar and/or faster target tracking rate. Additionally, unlike OFDM, OTFS is inter-carrier interference-free, enabling larger Doppler frequency estimation. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm using numerical results under different system settings.