Low-Complexity Equalization for Orthogonal Time and Frequency Signaling (OTFS)

Abstract: Recently, a new precoding technique called orthogonal time-frequency signaling (OTFS) has been proposed for time- and frequency-selective communication channels. OTFS precodes a data frame with a complete set of spreading sequences and transmits the results via orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). OTFS uses two dimensional (2D) linear spreading sequences in time and frequency which are the basis functions of a symplectic Fourier transform. OTFS allows the utilization of time- and frequency-diversity but requires maximum likelihood decoding to achieve full diversity. In this paper we show performance results of a low-complexity equalizer using soft-symbol feedback for interference cancellation after an initial minimum-mean square error equalization step. Performance results for an implementation in the delay-Doppler domain and in the time-frequency domain are compared. With our equalizer, OTFS achieves a gain of 5dB compared to OFDM for a bit error rate of $10^{-4}$ and a velocity of $200\,\text{km/h}$.