OTFS-IDMA: An Unsourced Multiple Access Scheme for Doubly-Dispersive Channels

We present an unsourced multiple access (UMAC) scheme tailored to high-mobility wireless channels. The proposed construction is based on orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation and sparse interleaver division multiple access (IDMA) in the delay-Doppler (DD) domain. The receiver runs a compressive-sensing joint activity-detection and channel estimation process followed by a single-user decoder which harnesses multipath diversity via the maximal-ratio combining (MRC) principle. Numerical results show the potential of DD-based uncoordinated schemes in the presence of double selectivity, while remarking the design tradeoffs and remaining challenges introduced by the proposed design.

A low-PAPR Pilot Design and Optimization for OTFS Modulation

Orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation has been proposed recently as a new waveform in the context of doubly-selective multi-path channels. This article proposes a novel pilot design that improves OTFS spectral efficiency (SE) while reducing its peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). Instead of adopting an embedded data-orthogonal pilot for channel estimation, our scheme relies on Chu sequences superimposed to data symbols. We optimize the construction by investigating the best energy split between pilot and data symbols. Two equalizers, and an iterative channel estimation and equalization procedure are considered. We present extensive numerical results of relevant performance metrics, including the normalized mean squared error of the estimator, bit error rate, PAPR and SE. Our results show that, while the embedded pilot scheme estimates the channel more accurately, our approach yields a better tradeoff by achieving much higher spectral efficiency and lower PAPR.

An Investigation of the Compressed Sensing Phase in Unsourced Multiple Access

A vast population of low-cost low-power transmitters sporadically sending small amounts of data over a common wireless medium is one of the main scenarios for Internet of things (IoT) data communications. At the medium access, the use of grant-free solutions may be preferred to reduce overhead even at the cost of multiple-access interference. Unsourced multiple access (UMA) has been recently established as relevant framework for energy efficient grant-free protocols. The use of a compressed sensing (CS) transmission phase is key in one of the two main classes of UMA protocols, yet little attention has been posed to sparse greedy algorithms as orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) and its variants. We analyze their performance and provide relevant guidance on how to optimally setup the CS phase. Minimum average transmission power and minimum number of channel uses are investigated together with the performance in terms of receiver operating characteristic (ROC). Interestingly, we show how the basic OMP and generalized OMP (gOMP) are the most competitive algorithms in their class.