FPGA Implementation of OTFS Modulation for 6G Communication Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents an FPGA implementation of OTFS modulation tailored for 6G systems, demonstrating its advantages over OFDM in high-mobility scenarios and providing detailed hardware performance analysis.

Contribution

It offers the first detailed FPGA implementation of OTFS modulation, including power, area, and timing analysis for 6G applications.

Findings

OTFS outperforms OFDM in high-mobility environments

Hardware implementation achieves low complexity for massive MIMO systems

Benchmarking results validate FPGA design efficiency

Abstract

Sixth-generation (6G) communication systems are poised to accommodate high data-rate wireless communication services in highly dynamic channels, with applications including high-speed trains, unmanned aerial vehicles, and intelligent transportation systems. Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation suffers from performance degradation in such high-mobility applications due to high Doppler spread in the channel. The recently proposed Orthogonal Time Frequency Space (OTFS) modulation scheme outperforms OFDM in terms of supporting a higher transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) user velocity. Additionally, the highly-dynamic time-frequency (TF) channel has little effect on OTFS modulated signals, which enables the realization of low-complexity pre-processing architectures for implementing massive-multiple input multiple outputs (MIMO) based OTFS systems. However, while OTFS has received attention in the literature from a theory and simulation perspective, there has been comparatively little work on real-time FPGA implementation of OTFS waveforms. Thus, in this paper, we first present a mathematical overview of OTFS modulation and then describe an FPGA implementation of OTFS implementation on hardware. Power, area, and timing analysis of the implemented design on a Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC FPGA are provided for benchmarking purposes.