Joint channel estimation and data detection for high rate orthogonal time frequency space systems

This paper proposes a new pilot pattern in the delay-Doppler (DD) domain for the orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) system. In contrast to the embedded-pilot schemes, guard intervals are not used so as increase the spectral efficiency. Also, compared to the superimposed design where data symbols and pilots are arranged on the entire DD grid, in the proposed rearrangement, the number of pilots used is only spread over a subgrid of the DD grid. Hence, the interference of pilots with data symbols is reduced. Afterwards, an algorithm for channel estimation (CE) and symbol detection in the DD domain benefiting from the sparsity of the DD channel is designed. The sparse CE step is formulated as a specific marginalization of the maximum a posteriori (MAP) criterion by providing a Bayesian approach via the mean-field approximation that involves the variational Bayesian expectation maximization (VB-EM) algorithm. Detection of data symbols is done using a low complexity MP algorithm. We also propose an interference cancellation (IC) scheme to mitigate contamination of data by pilots that is run after each CE step. To achieve a high CE accuracy, based on the mean mutual incoherence property (MIP), a pilot optimization problem for OTFS is formulated and develop a simulated annealing-based algorithm to solve it. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves a good compromise between spectral efficiency, complexity, and performance in terms of bit error rate (BER) and normalized mean square error (NMSE) when compared to literature benchmarks.