Spectrum and Orthogonality of Orthogonal Delay-Doppler Division Multiplexing Modulation Waveforms

Orthogonal delay-Doppler (DD) division multiplexing (ODDM) modulation has recently emerged as a promising paradigm for ensuring reliable communications in doubly-selective channels. This work investigates the spectra and orthogonality characteristics of analog (direct) and approximate digital implementations of ODDM systems. We first determine the time and frequency domain representations of the basis functions for waveform in analog and approximate digital ODDM systems. Thereafter, we derive their power spectral densities and show that while the spectrum of analog ODDM waveforms exhibits a step-wise behavior in its transition regions, the spectrum of approximate digital ODDM waveforms is confined to that of the ODDM sub-pulse. Next, we prove the orthogonality characteristics of approximate digital ODDM waveforms and show that, unlike analog ODDM waveforms, the approximate digital ODDM waveforms satisfy orthogonality without the need of additional time domain resources. Additionally, we examine the similarities and differences that implementations of approximate digital ODDM share with the other variants of DD modulations, focusing on the domain changes the symbols undergo, the type of pulse shaping and windowing used, and the domains and the sequence in which they are performed. Finally, we present numerical results to validate our findings and draw further insights.

Coexistence of OTFS Modulation With OFDM-based Communication Systems

This study examines the coexistence of orthogonal time-frequency space (OTFS) modulation with current fourth- and fifth-generation (4G/5G) wireless communication systems that primarily use orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) waveforms. We first derive the input-output-relation (IOR) of OTFS when it coexists with an OFDM system while considering the impact of unequal lengths of the cyclic prefixes (CPs) in the OTFS signal. We show analytically that the inclusion of multiple CPs to the OTFS signal results in the effective sampled delay-Doppler (DD) domain channel response to be less sparse. We also show that the effective DD domain channel coefficients for OTFS in coexisting systems are influenced by the unequal lengths of the CPs. Subsequently, we propose an embedded pilot-aided channel estimation (CE) technique for OTFS in coexisting systems that leverages the derived IOR for accurate channel characterization. Using numerical results, we show that ignoring the impact of unequal lengths of the CPs during signal detection can degrade the bit error rate performance of OTFS in coexisting systems. We also show that the proposed CE technique for OTFS in coexisting systems outperforms the state-of-the-art threshold-based CE technique.