On the Effect of Pulse Shaping Filters in Zak-OTFS Waveform for Radar Sensing

In radar sensing, the self-ambiguity function of the probing waveform plays a crucial role in the resolvability and detection of multiple targets. In the recent Zak-OTFS based radar literature, Gaussian pulse shaping filter has been considered, and it has been shown to offer better range/velocity estimation performance compared to the traditional chirp waveform in scenes with multiple targets. While the self-ambiguity function with Gaussian filter has very low side lobes, its main lobe is wide which compromises resolvability and performance. Motivated by this, we seek filters with better ambiguity characteristics. Specifically, we explore two other known filters, namely, sinc and Gaussian-sinc (GS) filters, and demonstrate that these filters offer better performance compared to Gaussian filter under different scenarios and receiver processing. Towards demonstrating this, we derive closed-form expressions for the self-ambiguity functions of Zak-OTFS waveform with sinc and GS filters. The ambiguity functions of sinc and GS filtered waveforms have narrow main lobes, resulting in better resolvability in scenes with densely populated targets for the basic peak-detection based receiver. The ambiguity function of Gaussian filtered waveform has very low sidelobes, resulting in better performance in sparsely populated scenes. When a receiver with inter-target interference mitigation is used, the sinc and GS filters perform better in both dense and sparsely populated scenes compared to Gaussian filter.

MIMO-Zak-OTFS with Superimposed Spread Pilots

In this paper, we consider the problem of spread pilot design and effective channel estimation in multiple-input multiple-output Zak-OTFS (MIMO-Zak-OTFS) with superimposed spread pilots, where data and spread pilot signals are superimposed in the same frame. To achieve good estimation performance in a MIMO setting, the spread pilots at different transmit antennas need to be effectively separated at the receiver. Towards this, we propose a spread pilot design that separates the pilot sequences in the cross-ambiguity domain and enables the estimation of the effective channel taps by a simple read-off operation. To further alleviate the effect of pilot-data interference on performance, we carry out turbo iterations between channel estimation and detection. Simulation results for $2\times 2$ and $3\times 3$ MIMO-Zak-OTFS with Gaussian-sinc pulse shaping filter for vehicular-A channel model show that the proposed pilot design and estimation scheme with three turbo iterations can achieve very good estimation/detection performance.