Spectral Efficiency of OTFS Based Orthogonal Multiple Access With Rectangular Pulses

In this paper, we consider Orthogonal Time Frequency Space (OTFS) modulation based multiple-access (MA). We specifically consider Orthogonal MA methods (OMA) where the user terminals (UTs) are allocated non-overlapping physical resource in the delay-Doppler (DD) and/or time-frequency (TF) domain. Well known OMA methods include, i) Guard Band (GB) based MA (GBMA), ii) Interleaved Delay Doppler MA (IDDMA), iii) Interleaved Time Frequency MA (ITFMA). The spectral efficiency (SE) performance of these OMA methods has only been studied for ideal transmit and receive pulses. With ideal pulses, IDDMA and ITFMA are free from multi-user interference (MUI) and unlike GBMA they do not use guard bands in the DD/TF domain. Since ideal pulses are not realizable, in this paper we study the SE performance of these OMA methods with practical rectangular pulses. For these OMA methods, we derive the expression for the received DD/TF domain symbols at the base station (BS) receiver and the effective DD domain channel matrix when rectangular pulses are used. Study of these expressions reveals the presence of MUI when rectangular pulses are used, although the amount of MUI in IDDMA is observed to be significantly smaller than that in ITFMA. We also derive the expression for the achievable sum SE. Through simulations, for practical values of the received signal-to-noise ratio, we observe that with rectangular pulses the sum SE achieved by the IDDMA method is significantly higher than that achieved by the ITFMA and GBMA methods.