Low-Complexity and Low-Overhead Receiver for OTFS via Large-Scale Antenna Array

Orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) is a modulation technique that is dedicated to the high-speed mobility scenario. However, its transmission involves a two-dimensional convolution of the symbols of interest and the multipath fading channel, and it complicates the equalization. In addition to the high-complexity issue, the existing pilot pattern to estimate the unknown channel accurately requires large overhead to avoid the pilot being contaminated, which is spectrally inefficient. In this paper, we propose a receiver approach by the marriage of the OTFS and a large-scale antenna array, which allows low-complexity detection and low-overhead pilot pattern design. First, the received signal from each path of the multipath fading channel is identified by a high-resolution receive beamformer facilitated by a large-scale antenna array. Then the identified signal from each angle in the delay-Doppler domain reduces to a flat-faded signal, which can be simply equalized using the channel information estimated by our pilot pattern. We further provide the estimator of the channel fading and the rotations of delay and Doppler. With these estimates, the symbols of interest can be recovered, and then, the signals from all angles of arrival are combined as different diversity versions. In addition, our pilot pattern with only around 25% overhead of the existing pilot pattern ensures the same protection of pilot pollution. Eventually, the efficiency, the reliability, and the low complexity of the proposed receiver approach are further validated by the numerical results.