Low complexity precoding and detection in multi-user massive MIMO OTFS downlink

We consider the problem of degradation in performance of multi-carrier multi-user massive MIMO systems when channel induced Doppler spread is high. Recently, Orthogonal Time Frequency Space (OTFS) modulation has been shown to be robust to channel induced Doppler spread. In OTFS based systems, information symbols are embedded in the delay-Doppler (DD) domain where they are jointly modulated to generate the time-domain transmit signal. Due to the multi-path delay and Doppler shifts, the DD domain information symbols need to be jointly demodulated at the receiver. For multi-carrier based communication (e.g., Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)), massive MIMO systems have been shown to achieve high spectral and energy efficiency with low complexity multi-user precoding in the downlink. Extending the same to OTFS based downlink multi-user massive MIMO systems is challenging due to the requirement for joint demodulation of all information symbols at the user terminal (UT). In this paper, we solve this problem by proposing a novel OTFS based multi-user precoder at the base station (BS) and a corresponding low complexity detector (LCD) at the user terminals (UTs), which allows for separate demodulation of each DD domain information symbol at the UT. The complexity of the proposed precoder increases only linearly with increasing number of BS antennas Q and the number of UTs. We show, through analysis, that as Q increases (with total transmitted power decreased linearly with Q), the proposed low complexity detector achieves a sum spectral efficiency close to that achieved with optimal joint demodulation at each UT. Numerical simulations confirm our analysis and also show that the spectral efficiency and error rate performance of the proposed OTFS based massive MIMO precoder (with the proposed LCD detector at each UT) is significantly more robust to channel induced Doppler spread when compared to OFDM based multi-user massive MIMO systems.