This work studies the equalization methods for the reduced zero-padding version of the orthogonal time frequency space modulation. Here, the focus is on applications in low data rate scenarios such as the Internet of Things, and the case where the number of subcarriers and time slots are small will be considered. First, the system equation is established to model the inter-subcarrier and inter-slot interference phenomena. Based on the system model, three sphere-decoding based equalization methods are proposed. The first method is to directly apply the sphere-decoding algorithm on the full-scale system model; for the second method, the transmitter needs to perform the triangular precoding; and for the third method, the transmitter needs to perform the diagonal precoding. Simulation results show that the proposed sphere-decoding based methods achieve better bit error rate performance than the state-of-the-art methods like message passing, unitary approximate message passing, and variational approximate message passing, especially when the channel has severe inter-slot interference.
INTRODUCTIONOrthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) has been proposed as a promising modulation technology for high-mobility scenarios [1], which spreads data symbols over both the delay and Doppler domain, resulting in better performance compared with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). Many studies have been conducted covering various aspects of OTFS [2-6] such as receiver design, channel estimation, performance analysis, and multi-antenna combination, etc. Similar to OFDM, OTFS also needs to use the prefix. Basically, there are two versions of OTFS according to the way of This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.