Amplitude Barycenter Calibration of Delay-Doppler Spectrum for OTFS Signal—An Endeavor to Integrated Sensing and Communication Waveform Design

Orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) is considered a promising modulation technology for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems, which is robust against Doppler effects in time-frequency doubly-selective channels. However, limited by the communication bandwidth and frame duration, the fractional delay and Doppler problem in OTFS-ISAC systems, that is, the delay and Doppler of the channel are not integer multiples of the resolutions, leading to estimation errors. To help overcome this issue, in this work, we propose an amplitude barycenter calibration (ABC) algorithm, which uses observation points on the integer delay-Doppler grid to calibrate target estimates, thereby providing satisfactory sensing performance without broadening the bandwidth. In addition, the estimation error and Cramér–Rao lower bound of the ABC algorithm were derived by analyzing its sensing performance. The results demonstrated that the proposed ABC algorithm can improve distance and velocity sensing resolution while achieving acceptable communication performance.