Variational autoencoder based receiver for orthogonal time frequency space modulation

Abstract The emerging orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation is demonstrated to offer reliable communication performance advantages over orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in doubly-dispersive fading channel. However, the existing embedded pilot-aided method to estimate channel impulse response (CIR) requires enormous spectral overhead to avoid the contamination of pilot symbols. In this paper, we present a variational autoencoder (VAE) based receiver for OTFS modulation that achieve a joint estimation and detection without pilot in delay-Doppler (DD) domain. The variational approach is considered to simplify the problem, and evidence lower bound (ELBO) is derived as loss function. In encoder step, an approximate posterior probability is introduced and utilized to minimize the Kullback-Leibler (KL) distance. Then we estimate CIR in decoder step and maximize the ELBO at last. From our simulation results, the proposed VAE based receiver for OTFS modulation enjoys a promising performance with other methods.