Near-Optimal BEM OTFS Receiver With Low Pilot Overhead for High-Mobility Communications

In this paper, a new receiver design based on basis expansion model (BEM) orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) is presented for high-mobility communications with Doppler-spread channel. By deriving an analytical BEM OTFS system model, a low-order generalized complex exponential BEM (GCE-BEM) aided rough channel estimation is proposed at the initial stage with low pilot overhead, followed by equalization. Then, the refinement of channel estimation and equalization is conducted iteratively, in which a high-resolution GCE-BEM model with a large BEM order is adopted and the detected data symbols are exploited as pseudo-pilots, leading to higher estimation accuracy. Simulation results show that the proposed BEM OTFS receiver significantly outperforms the existing OTFS receivers in terms of the mean square error (MSE) of channel estimation and bit error rate (BER), while featuring low pilot overhead. Results also show the near-optimal performance of the novel solution, i.e., achieved BER is very close to the case of perfect channel estimation. The theoretical lower bound on MSE of channel estimation is derived to verify the effectiveness of the proposed BEM OTFS receiver, which is shown to be close to simulation results.