Delay Alignment Modulation: Enabling Equalization-Free Single-Carrier Communication

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel broadband transmission technology, termed delay alignment modulation (DAM), which enables the low-complexity equalization-free single-carrier communication, yet without suffering from inter-symbol interference (ISI). The key idea of DAM is to deliberately introduce appropriate delays for information-bearing symbols at the transmitter side, so that after propagating over the time-dispersive channel, all multi-path signal components will arrive at the receiver simultaneously and constructively. We first show that by applying DAM for the basic multiple-input single-output (MISO) communication system, an ISI-free additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) system can be obtained with the simple zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming. Furthermore, the more general DAM scheme is studied with the ISI-maximal-ratio transmission (MRT) and the ISI-minimum mean-square error (MMSE) beamforming. Simulation results are provided to show that when the channel is sparse and/or the antenna dimension is large, DAM not only resolves the notorious practical issues suffered by orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) such as high peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR), severe out-of-band (OOB) emission, and vulnerability to carrier frequency offset (CFO), with low complexity, but also achieves higher spectral efficiency due to the saving of guard interval overhead.