Low-Complexity Symbol Detection and Interference Cancellation for OTFS System

Orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) is a two-dimensional modulation scheme realized in the delay-Doppler domain, which targets the robust wireless transmissions in high-mobility environments. In such scenarios, OTFS signal suffers from multipath channel with continuous Doppler spread, which results in significant inter-symbol interference and inter-Doppler interference (IDI). In this article, we analyze the interference generation mechanism, and compare statistical distributions of the IDI in two typical cases, i.e., limited-Doppler-shift channel and continuous-Doppler-spread channel (CoDSC). Focusing on the OTFS signal transmission over the CoDSC, our study firstly indicates that the widespread IDI incurs a computational burden for the element-wise detector like the message passing in the state-of-the-art works. Addressing this challenge, we propose a block-wise OTFS receiver by exploiting the structure and characteristics of the OTFS transmission matrix. In the receiver, we deliberately design an iteration strategy among the least squares minimum residual based channel equalizer, reliability-based symbol detector and interference eliminator, which can realize fast convergence by leveraging the sparsity of channel matrix. The simulations demonstrate that, in the CoDSC, the proposed scheme achieves much less detection error, and meanwhile reduces the computational complexity by an order of magnitude, compared with the state-of-the-art OTFS receivers.