Sparse channel estimation algorithms for OTFS system

International audienceOrthogonal time-frequency space (OTFS) modulation, which has recently been proposed in the literature, is one of the promising techniques designed in the 2D Delay-Doppler domain adapted to combat high Doppler fading channels. However, channel estimation in high Doppler scenarios in advanced mobile-communication systems is still a challenging task. In this paper, the problem of channel estimation in the Delay-Doppler domain of the OTFS is focused on. First, a simple adaptation of the generalized orthogonal matching pursuit procedure, which will serve as a baseline method in this work, is proposed. Then, iterative algorithms are derived beneficiating from the sparsity of the channel. The unknown channel vector is separated into an unknown sparse support vector corresponding to the delay and Doppler taps, and an unknown vector of channel gains. These algorithms involve ℓ1-norm minimization and a two-stage iterative procedure to recover alternatively the channel support and its coefficients. The estimation problem is also addressed from a Bayesian point of view. The sparse representation is reformulated as a specific marginalization of the maximum a posteriori problem on the support of the channel. To deal with the intractability of this problem, two existing techniques are adapted to this context, namely: The Monte Carlo Markov chain with the Gibbs sampler and variational mean-field approximation with the variational Bayesian expectation-maximization procedure. Finally, to assess the performance of the proposed algorithms, their complexity and performance are compared against existing methods. Experimental tests, conducted in high-mobility scenarios and low-latency applications, show that the proposed schemes are slightly more expensive in terms of complexity load but perform significantly better in terms of normalized mean square error and bit error rate