Effects of Residual Chirp Rate on DAFT-s-AFDM Uplink Performance

Abstract: Affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) is robust to doubly dispersive channels in high-mobility 6G systems but, like orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), suffers from a high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). Spreading with a discrete affine Fourier transform (DAFT) yields DAFT-s-AFDM, whose precoder and modulator chirps can be chosen independently. For a single user with zero-offset localized allocation, we show that these two chirps merge into a single residual chirp whose rate, with the other two chirp rates fixed, alone determines their effect. At the transmitter, this rate defines a circulant spreading kernel whose fourth moment quantifies the envelope fluctuation; symmetries reduce its characterization to rates in [0, 1/4]. At a linear minimum mean-square error (MMSE) receiver, the residual chirp redistributes the mean- square error across symbols without changing its total; under a Gaussian approximation, a more uniform per-symbol error lowers the uncoded bit error rate (BER). In uncoded QPSK simulations, a zero rate yields the lowest PAPR, whereas a generic rate reduces the signal-to-noise ratio required for a BER of $10<sup>{-3}$ by 4.4 dB at a 3.33 dB PAPR cost (exceedance probability $10<sup>{-3}$);a rate of 1/3 captures 2.8 dB of this gain for only 0.88 dB of that cost.