Doppler-Resilient Universal Filtered MultiCarrier (DR-UFMC): A Beyond-OTFS Modulation

Abstract: In the past few years, some alternatives to the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) modulation have been considered to improve its spectral containment and its performance level in the presence of heavy Doppler shifts. This paper examines a novel modulation, named Doppler-Resilient Universal Filtered MultiCarrier (DR-UFMC), which has the objective of combining the advantages provided by the Universal Filtered MultiCarrier (UFMC) modulation (i.e., better spectral containment), with those of the Orthogonal Time Frequency Space (OTFS) modulation (i.e., better performance in time-varying environments). The paper contains the mathematical model and detailed transceiver block scheme of the newly described modulation, along with a numerical analysis contrasting DR-UFMC against OTFS, OFDM with one-tap frequency domain equalization (FDE), and OFDM with multicarrier multisymbol linear MMSE processing. Results clearly show the superiority, with respect to the cited benchmarks, of the newly proposed modulation in terms of achievable spectral efficiency. Interestingly, it is also seen that OFDM, when considered in conjunction with multicarrier multisymbol linear minimum mean squares error (MMSE) processing, performs slightly better than OTFS in terms of achievable spectral efficiency.