The Resurrection of Spectrum Spreading for 6G and Beyond: From Sinusoids to Chirps

Abstract: Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) and its static sinusoidal subcarriers have underpinned the 4G and 5G eras, delivering high spectral efficiency and resilience to multipath fading through an efficient multicarrier architecture. However, as future systems move toward doubly dispersive environments driven by high-mobility applications and migration to mmWave/sub-THz bands, the time-invariance assumption underlying OFDM becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, and Doppler-induced degradation becomes prominent. While enhancements such as MIMO, advanced coding, and scheduling provide incremental remedies, they introduce additional overhead, because the sinusoidal subcarrier itself offers no inherent waveform-level robustness to Doppler impairments. Accordingly, two time-frequency spreading philosophies have emerged to improve Doppler resilience by distributing each symbol's energy across both dimensions of the time-frequency plane: (i) 2D isotropic spreading via the delay-Doppler (DD) domain, exemplified by the orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) family, and (ii) sheared spreading via parameterizable chirps, exemplified by the affine frequency-division multiplexing (AFDM) family. In this article, we examine key considerations for future waveform design across these paradigms and argue that transitioning from the sinusoidal subcarriers of OFDM to the chirp-based subcarriers offers a viable design direction for improving Doppler robustness while retaining much of the mature OFDM infrastructure. This perspective also highlights the suitability of chirp-based waveforms for integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) and their extensibility to emerging physical-layer techniques. Overall, we argue that the transition from sinusoids to chirps is a technically motivated, compelling evolutionary direction for future wireless physical layer design.