Disjoint Delay-Doppler Estimation in OTFS ISAC with Deep Learning-aided Path Detection

Abstract: In this work, the problem of communication and radar sensing in orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) with reduced cyclic prefix (RCP) is addressed. A monostatic integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system is developed and, it is demonstrated that by leveraging the cyclic shift property inherent in the RCP, a delay-Doppler (DD) channel matrix that encapsulates the effects of propagation delays and Doppler shifts through unitary matrices can be derived. Consequently, a novel low-complexity correlation-based algorithm performing disjoint delay-Doppler estimation is proposed for channel estimation. Subsequently, this estimation approach is adapted to perform radar sensing on backscattered data frames. Moreover, channel estimation is complemented by a deep learning (DL) architecture that improves path detection and accuracy under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions, compared to stopping criterion (SC) based multipath detection. Simulation results indicate that the proposed estimation scheme achieves lower normalized mean squared error (NMSE) compared to conventional channel estimation algorithms and sensing performance close to the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB). Furthermore, an iterative data detection algorithm based on matched filter (MF) and combining is developed by exploiting the unitary property of delay-Doppler parameterized matrices. Simulation results reveal that this iterative scheme achieves performance comparable to that of the linear minimum mean squared error (LMMSE) estimator while significantly reducing computational complexity.