Non-Orthogonal AFDM: A Promising Spectrum-Efficient Waveform for 6G High-Mobility Communications

This paper proposes a spectrum-efficient nonorthogonal affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) waveform for reliable high-mobility communications in the upcoming sixth-generation (6G) mobile systems. Our core idea is to introduce a compression factor to enable controllable subcarrier overlapping in chirp-based AFDM modulation. To mitigate intercarrier interference (ICI), we introduce linear precoding at the transmitter and an iterative detection scheme at the receiver. Simulation results demonstrate that these techniques can effectively reduce interference and maintain robust bit error rate (BER) performance even under aggressive compression factors and high-mobility channel conditions. The proposed non-orthogonal AFDM waveform offers a promising solution for next-generation wireless networks, balancing spectrum efficiency and Doppler resilience in highly dynamic environments.

Multi-Modal Concurrent Transmission

This paper introduces a novel physical-layer method labelled as Multi-Modal Concurrent Transmission (MMCT) for efficient transmission of multiple data streams with different reliability-latency performance requirements. The MMCT arranges data from multiple streams within a same physical-layer transport block wherein stream-specific modulation and coding scheme (MCS) selection is combined with joint mapping of modulated codewords to Multiple-Input Multiple-Output spatial layers and frequency resources. Mapping to spatial-frequency resources with higher Signal-to-Noise Ratios (SNRs) provides the required performance boost for the more demanding streams. In tactile internet applications, wherein haptic feedback/actuation and audio-video streams flow in parallel, the method provides significant SNR and spectral efficiency enhancements compared to conventional 3GPP New Radio (NR) transmission methods.