Low-Complexity Linear Diversity-Combining Detector for MIMO-OTFS

Abstract: This paper presents a low complexity detector for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems based on the recently proposed orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation. In the proposed detector, the copies of the transmitted symbol-vectors received through the different diversity branches (propagation paths and receive antennas) are linearly combined using the maximum ratio combining (MRC) technique to iteratively improve the signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) at the output of the combiner. To alleviate the performance degradation due to spatial correlation at the receiver antennas, we present a sample-based method to estimate such correlation and find the optimized combining weights for MRC from the estimated correlation matrix. The detector performance and complexity improve over the linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) and message passing (MP) detectors proposed in the literature for MIMO-OTFS.