Joint Phase Noise and Channel Estimation for OTFS

TL;DR

This paper analyzes phase noise effects in OTFS systems, revealing severe inter-Doppler interference and proposing a joint estimation method that significantly improves BER performance.

Contribution

It introduces a joint channel and phase noise estimation technique using Wiener filtering, addressing limitations of existing methods that assume known channels and only CPE correction.

Findings

OTFS is highly sensitive to phase noise and suffers from severe IDI.

Existing phase noise estimation methods are insufficient for OTFS.

Proposed Wiener filtering approach improves BER by up to 8 dB.

Abstract

This paper investigates the effect of oscillator phase noise in orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) systems. The paper provides in-depth analysis of the interference due to phase noise in the delay-Doppler domain and derives expressions for SINR for three different oscillator types, namely free-running oscillators, continuous-time phase locked loops (PLLs) and discrete-time PLLs. The analysis demonstrates the OTFS is sensitive to phase noise and requires appropriate estimation and compensation. In particular, the analysis shows phase noise imposed inter-Doppler-interference (IDI) is severe and that existing phase noise estimation techniques which only consider the common-phase-error (CPE) can not compensate this IDI effectively. Additionally, the existing methods in the OTFS literature on phase noise assume the channel to be a known single tap channel. Hence, in this paper, we propose a method for joint channel and phase noise estimation using a Wiener filtering approach. Our proposed method exploits the statistical nature of both the phase noise and the Doppler spread channel. Our numerical results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed technique, with gains of up to 8~dB in terms of bit error rate (BER) over existing methods in the literature.