Iterative channel estimation and data detection algorithm for OTFS modulation

Abstract : In this paper, we design an iterative channel estimation and data detection algorithm in delay-Doppler domain for orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) system by taking advantage of the sparse nature of the channel in this domain. The proposed algorithm iterates between message-passing-aided data detection and data-aided channel estimation. This sparse channel estimation is reformulated as a specific marginalization of maximum a posteriori (MAP) problem. To deal with the intractability of this problem, we provide a Bayesian approach based on the variational mean-field approximation via the variational Bayesian expectation maximization (VB-EM) algorithm. Finally, we compare the complexity and performance in term of Bit Error Rate (BER) and Normalized Mean Square Error (NMSE) of the proposed solution to a reference solution in the literature (SP-I).