Error Performance of Coded AFDM Systems in Doubly Selective Channels

Affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) is a strong candidate for the sixth-generation wireless network thanks to its strong resilience to delay-Doppler spreads. In this letter, we investigate the error performance of coded AFDM systems in doubly selective channels. We first study the conditional pairwise-error probability (PEP) of AFDM system and derive its conditional coding gain. Then, we show that there is a fundamental trade-off between the diversity gain and the coding gain of AFDM system, namely the coding gain declines with a descending speed with respect to the number of separable paths, while the diversity gain increases linearly. Moreover, we propose a near-optimal turbo decoder based on the sum-product algorithm for coded AFDM systems to improve its error performance. Simulation results verify our analyses and the effectiveness of the proposed turbo decoder, showing that AFDM outperforms orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) in both coded and uncoded cases over high-mobility channels.

A Vision-Centric Approach for Static Map Element Annotation

The recent development of online static map element (a.k.a. HD Map) construction algorithms has raised a vast demand for data with ground truth annotations. However, available public datasets currently cannot provide high-quality training data regarding consistency and accuracy. To this end, we present CAMA: a vision-centric approach for Consistent and Accurate Map Annotation. Without LiDAR inputs, our proposed framework can still generate high-quality 3D annotations of static map elements. Specifically, the annotation can achieve high reprojection accuracy across all surrounding cameras and is spatial-temporal consistent across the whole sequence. We apply our proposed framework to the popular nuScenes dataset to provide efficient and highly accurate annotations. Compared with the original nuScenes static map element, models trained with annotations from CAMA achieve lower reprojection errors (e.g., 4.73 vs. 8.03 pixels).

A Phase-Coded Time-Domain Interleaved OTFS Waveform with Improved Ambiguity Function

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is a significant application scenario in future wireless communication networks, and sensing is always evaluated by the ambiguity function. To enhance the sensing performance of the orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) waveform, we propose a novel time-domain interleaved cyclic-shifted P4-coded OTFS (TICP4-OTFS) with improved ambiguity function. TICP4-OTFS can achieve superior autocorrelation features in both the time and frequency domains by exploiting the multicarrier-like form of OTFS after interleaved and the favorable autocorrelation attributes of the P4 code. Furthermore, we present the vectorized formulation of TICP4-OTFS modulation as well as its signal structure in each domain. Numerical simulations show that our proposed TICP4-OTFS waveform outperforms OTFS with a narrower mainlobe as well as lower and more distant sidelobes in terms of delay and Doppler-dimensional ambiguity functions, and an instance of range estimation using pulse compression is illustrated to exhibit the proposed waveform\u2019s greater resolution. Besides, TICP4-OTFS achieves better performance of bit error rate for communication in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scenarios.

Locate and Beamform: Two-dimensional Locating All-neural Beamformer for Multi-channel Speech Separation

Recently, stunning improvements on multi-channel speech separation have been achieved by neural beamformers when direction information is available. However, most of them neglect to utilize speaker's 2-dimensional (2D) location cues contained in mixture signal, which limits the performance when two sources come from close directions. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end beamforming network for 2D location guided speech separation merely given mixture signal. It first estimates discriminable direction and 2D location cues, which imply directions the sources come from in multi views of microphones and their 2D coordinates. These cues are then integrated into location-aware neural beamformer, thus allowing accurate reconstruction of two sources' speech signals. Experiments show that our proposed model not only achieves a comprehensive decent improvement compared to baseline systems, but avoids inferior performance on spatial overlapping cases.

An Overview of Resource Allocation in Integrated Sensing and Communication

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is considered as a promising solution for improving spectrum efficiency and relieving wireless spectrum congestion. This paper systematically introduces the evolutionary path of ISAC technologies, then sorts out and summarizes the current research status of ISAC resource allocation. From the perspective of different integrated levels of ISAC, we introduce and elaborate the research progress of resource allocation in different stages, namely, resource separated, orthogonal, converged, and collaborative stages. In addition, we give in-depth consideration to propose a new resource allocation framework from a multi-granularity perspective. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed framework with a case of full-duplex ISAC system.

Overview and Performance Analysis of Various Waveforms in High Mobility Scenarios

In the high-mobility scenarios of next-generation wireless communication systems (beyond 5G/6G), the performance of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) deteriorates drastically due to the loss of orthogonality between the subcarriers caused by large Doppler frequency shifts. Various emerging waveforms have been proposed for fast time-varying channels with excellent results. In this paper, we classify these waveforms from the perspective of their modulation domain and establish a unified framework to provide a comprehensive system structure comparison. Then we analyze bit error rate (BER) performance of each waveform in doubly selective channels. Through the discussions on their complexity and compatibility with OFDM systems, we finally give the candidate waveform suggestions.

Cyclic Delay-Doppler Shift: A Simple Transmit Diversity Technique for Delay-Doppler Waveforms in Doubly Selective Channels

Delay-Doppler waveform design has been considered as a promising solution to achieve reliable communication under high-mobility channels for the space-air-ground-integrated networks (SAGIN). In this paper, we introduce the cyclic delay-Doppler shift (CDDS) technique for delay-Doppler waveforms to extract transmit diversity in doubly selective channels. Two simple CDDS schemes, named time-domain CDDS (TD-CDDS) and modulation-domain CDDS (MD-CDDS), are proposed in the setting of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). We demonstrate the applications of CDDS on two representative delay-Doppler waveforms, namely orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) and affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM), by deriving their corresponding CDDS matrices. Furthermore, we prove theoretically and experimentally that CDDS can provide OTFS and AFDM with full transmit diversity gain on most occasions.

MIMO-DBnet: Multi-channel Input and Multiple Outputs DOA-aware Beamforming Network for Speech Separation

Recently, many deep learning based beamformers have been proposed for multi-channel speech separation. Nevertheless, most of them rely on extra cues known in advance, such as speaker feature, face image or directional information. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end beamforming network for direction guided speech separation given merely the mixture signal, namely MIMO-DBnet. Specifically, we design a multi-channel input and multiple outputs architecture to predict the direction-of-arrival based embeddings and beamforming weights for each source. The precisely estimated directional embedding provides quite effective spatial discrimination guidance for the neural beamformer to offset the effect of phase wrapping, thus allowing more accurate reconstruction of two sources' speech signals. Experiments show that our proposed MIMO-DBnet not only achieves a comprehensive decent improvement compared to baseline systems, but also maintain the performance on high frequency bands when phase wrapping occurs.

MIMO-DoAnet: Multi-channel Input and Multiple Outputs DoA Network with Unknown Number of Sound Sources

Recent neural network based Direction of Arrival (DoA) estimation algorithms have performed well on unknown number of sound sources scenarios. These algorithms are usually achieved by mapping the multi-channel audio input to the single output (i.e. overall spatial pseudo-spectrum (SPS) of all sources), that is called MISO. However, such MISO algorithms strongly depend on empirical threshold setting and the angle assumption that the angles between the sound sources are greater than a fixed angle. To address these limitations, we propose a novel multi-channel input and multiple outputs DoA network called MIMO-DoAnet. Unlike the general MISO algorithms, MIMO-DoAnet predicts the SPS coding of each sound source with the help of the informative spatial covariance matrix. By doing so, the threshold task of detecting the number of sound sources becomes an easier task of detecting whether there is a sound source in each output, and the serious interaction between sound sources disappears during inference stage. Experimental results show that MIMO-DoAnet achieves relative 18.6% and absolute 13.3%, relative 34.4% and absolute 20.2% F1 score improvement compared with the MISO baseline system in 3, 4 sources scenes. The results also demonstrate MIMO-DoAnet alleviates the threshold setting problem and solves the angle assumption problem effectively.

Channel Estimation and Signal Detection for MIMO-AFDM under Doubly Selective Channels

On the heels of orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation, the recently discovered affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) is a promising waveform for the sixth-generation wireless network due to its strong delay-doppler resilience against the double dispersive channels. With the superiorities of high multiplexing and diversity gain of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), we derive a vectorized input-output formulation of the MIMO-AFDM system. Correspondingly, we also propose an efficient single pilot aided with minimum guard (SPA-MG) scheme to perform channel estimation in the discrete affine Fourier transform (DAFT) domain. Furthermore, the message passing based iterative detector is explored for signal detection. Finally, the bit error ratio (BER) performances are simulated under doubly selective channels. It is worth emphasizing that the MIMO-AFDM system can achieve outstanding performance similar to MIMO-OTFS. Additionally, compared to ideal channel state information, our proposed SPA-MG scheme is verified to provide marginal difference with the least overhead.