Orthogonal Chirp Delay-Doppler Division Multiplexing (CDDM) Modulation for High Mobility Communications

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel multi-carrier modulation framework for high-mobility communication scenarios. Our key idea lies in spreading data symbols across the delay-Doppler (DD) domain through orthogonal chirp-Zak transform (CZT). To enable efficient signal multiplexing, the proposed modulation scheme employs a transmitter signal that maintains orthogonality with the inherent resolution characteristics of the DD plane. Termed as Orthogonal Chirp Delay-Doppler Division Multiplexing (CDDM), we demonstrate a synergistic integration of chirp waveform properties with the channel structure of the DD domain, thereby achieving advantages with both lower computational efficiency and improved detection performance. We introduce a novel CZT-based superimposed sparse pilot structure to enable simultaneous estimation of delay-Doppler shifts and channel coefficients. For enhanced performance, we further develop an embedded pilot scheme that demonstrates channel estimation performance comparable to that of Orthogonal Delay-Doppler Division Multiplexing (ODDM) systems. Simulation results demonstrate that CDDM achieves significant bit error rate (BER) improvements over existing modulation schemes , under perfect channel state information (CSI), as well as superior out-of-band emissions (OOBE). Further, for the imperfect CSI case, the proposed CZT-based superimposed pilot scheme leads to significantly reduced normalized mean square error (NMSE), whilst attaining equivalent estimation accuracy to that of ODDM with lower computational complexity.