Unitary-Precoded Single-Carrier Waveforms for High Mobility: Detection and Channel Estimation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a family of USC waveforms for high mobility scenarios, providing universal detection and channel estimation methods, and demonstrates their effectiveness compared to OFDM in real-time indoor tests.

Contribution

It proposes a unified USC waveform framework encompassing OTFS and OTSM, with universal detection and channel estimation methods applicable to all USC variants.

Findings

USC waveforms perform comparably to OFDM in indoor tests.

Universal detection and channel estimation methods work for all USC variants.

Unitary precoding yields consistent error performance across different USC choices.

Abstract

This paper presents unitary-precoded single-carrier (USC) modulation as a family of waveforms based on multiplexing the information symbols on time domain unitary basis functions. The common property of these basis functions is that they span the entire time and frequency plane. The recently proposed orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) and orthogonal time sequency multiplexing (OTSM) based on discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and Walsh Hadamard transform (WHT), respectively, fall in the general framework of USC waveforms. In this work, we present channel estimation and detection methods that work for any USC waveform and numerically show that any choice of unitary precoding results in the same error performance. Lastly, we implement some USC systems and compare their performance with OFDM in a real-time indoor setting using an SDR platform.