A Low Complexity MAP Detector for OTFS Modulation in Logarithmic Domain

Abstract: Orthogonal time-frequency space (OTFS) has been confirmed to take advantage of full time-frequency diversity to significantly improve error performance in high-mobility scenarios. We found that the proposed message passing (MP) and variational Bayes (VB) detectors can achieve approximate maximum a posteriori (MAP) detection, the interferences cannot be completely eliminated in the absence of noise. To achieve near-optimal MAP detection, this letter proposes a novel detection method based on sum-product algorithm (SPA) with low complexity. Leveraging subtly factorized posteriori probabilities, the obtained pairwise interactions can effectively avoid enumeration of high-dimensional variables, thereby making it applicable to fractional Doppler cases. We further simplify the proposed algorithm in the logarithmic domain so that the message propagation processing only involves addition. Finally, simulations results demonstrate the superior error performance gains of our proposed algorithm at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs).