Unique Word Channel Estimation for Oversampled OTFS

TL;DR

This paper introduces UW-OTFS, a novel OTFS variant that mitigates energy leakage caused by oversampling and pulse shaping, resulting in higher spectral efficiency and improved performance in fractional DD channels.

Contribution

The paper presents UW-OTFS, a new OTFS scheme that places pilots in the oversampled time domain to reduce leakage and enhance spectral efficiency compared to traditional methods.

Findings

UW-OTFS achieves 36% higher spectral efficiency.

UW-OTFS outperforms traditional OTFS in bit error ratio.

UW-OTFS reduces out-of-band emissions.

Abstract

Practical aspects of orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS), such as channel estimation and its performance in fractional delay-Doppler (DD) channels, are a lively topic in the OTFS community. Oversampling and pulse shaping are also discussed in the existing literature, but not in the context of channel estimation. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to address the problem of data-to-pilot and vice versa energy leakage caused by oversampling and pulse shaping in OTFS. Theoretical analysis is performed on an oversampled, pulse-shaped OTFS implementing the embedded pilot channel estimation technique, revealing a trade-off between the amount of energy leakage and excess bandwidth introduced by the pulse shape. Next, a novel variant of OTFS is introduced, called UW-OTFS, which is designed to overcome the leakage problem by placing the pilot in the oversampled time domain instead of the DD domain. The unique structure of UW-OTFS offers 36 percent higher spectral efficiency than the OTFS with embedded pilot. UW-OTFS also outperforms traditional OTFS in terms of bit error ratio and out-of-band emissions.