Low Complexity Precoding and Detection in Multi-user Massive MIMO OTFS Downlink

TL;DR

This paper introduces a low complexity precoding and detection scheme for multi-user massive MIMO systems using OTFS modulation, improving robustness to Doppler spread and reducing computational complexity.

Contribution

It proposes a novel OTFS-based multi-user precoder and a low complexity detector that enable separate demodulation, enhancing efficiency and Doppler robustness in massive MIMO downlink systems.

Findings

Achieves near-optimal spectral efficiency with linear complexity in BS antennas and users.

Significantly improves robustness to Doppler spread compared to OFDM systems.

Maintains high error rate performance with reduced computational complexity.

Abstract

We consider the problem of degradation in performance of multi-carrier multi-user massive MIMO systems when channel induced Doppler spread is high. Recently, Orthogonal Time Frequency Space (OTFS) modulation has been shown to be robust to channel induced Doppler spread. In OTFS based systems, information symbols are embedded in the delay-Doppler (DD) domain where they are jointly modulated to generate the time-domain transmit signal. Due to the multi-path delay and Doppler shifts, the DD domain information symbols need to be jointly demodulated at the receiver. For multi-carrier based communication (e.g., Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)), massive MIMO systems have been shown to achieve high spectral and energy efficiency with low complexity multi-user precoding in the downlink. Extending the same to OTFS based downlink multi-user massive MIMO systems is challenging due to the requirement for joint demodulation of all information symbols at the user terminal (UT). In this paper, we solve this problem by proposing a novel OTFS based multi-user precoder at the base station (BS) and a corresponding low complexity detector (LCD) at the user terminals (UTs), which allows for separate demodulation of each DD domain information symbol at the UT. The complexity of the proposed precoder increases only linearly with increasing number BS antennas Q and the number of UTs. We show, through analysis, that as Q increases (with total transmitted power decreased linearly with Q), the proposed low complexity detector achieves a sum SE close to that achieved with optimal joint demodulation at each UT. Numerical simulations confirm our analysis and also show that the SE and error rate performance of the proposed OTFS based massive MIMO precoder and LCD detector is significantly more robust to channel induced Doppler spread when compared to OFDM based multi-user massive MIMO systems.