Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2607.28059

Fractional Doppler Effects on OTFS-NOMA HetNets with Mixed-Mobility Users

Abstract

Heterogeneous networks (HetNets) are considered a promising approach to meet the increasing throughput requirements of 6G vehicular networks. The integration of orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has demonstrated significant improvements in the reliability of wireless networks under mixed-mobility. Applying this combination in HetNets helps accommodate high-mobility (HM) and low-mobility (LM) users while effectively addressing high Doppler shifts. However, in practical scenarios, fractional Doppler arises from the mismatch between the actual Doppler frequency and its discrete representation on the DD grid. This effect leads to inter-Doppler interference (IDI) that can significantly degrade detection performance. In our work, we investigate the effect of fractional Doppler on OTFS-NOMA systems under mixed-mobility conditions and analyze how NOMA power allocation can be optimized to mitigate the resulting performance degradation. OTFS modulation is used for the HM user, while the LM users' symbols are embedded in the time-frequency (TF) domain. Minimum mean square error (MMSE) detection is utilized under multiple assumptions regarding the knowledge of the IDI parameters. We investigate the impact of optimizing NOMA power allocation on the overall system performance. The purpose of this work is to analyze the impact of fractional Doppler in OTFS-NOMA systems in HetNets rather than proposing new detection algorithms for OTFS modulation. The results validate the significant performance impact of fractional Doppler on the system and demonstrate the role of power allocation in mitigating IDI effects in terms of spectral efficiency and number of users served.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Wafa Hedhly, Leila Musavian, Nikolaos Thomos. 2026-07-30. Fractional Doppler Effects on OTFS-NOMA HetNets with Mixed-Mobility Users. https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2026.3716420

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Load Balancing in Multi-Shell LEO Satellite Networks with Successive Interference Cancellation

Multi-shell low Earth orbit (LEO) networks can increase service opportunities, but altitude-dependent propagation can concentrate traffic on lower shells and create strong inter-shell interference under full frequency reuse. This paper develops a mathematical framework for load balancing in multi-shell LEO satellite networks. Satellites on each shell form an independent spherical Poisson point process (SPPP), and the typical user associates with one of the per-shell serving satellites through a shell-dependent biased received-power rule, with receiver-side successive interference cancellation (SIC) under full frequency reuse. Shell-wise association probabilities, conditioned serving-distance distributions, and the rate coverage probability under shell-dependent traffic loads are derived and validated by simulation. The results show that shell-dependent biasing alleviates lower-shell traffic concentration and improves rate coverage, while receiver-side SIC mitigates the dominant lower-shell interference experienced by users associated with upper shells. Load balancing provides its largest rate-coverage gain in traffic hotspots, while SIC becomes more valuable as receive-side isolation weakens. With a fixed satellite budget, distributing satellites across multiple shells can further improve hotspot rate coverage by adding shell-wise serving opportunities.

eess.SP

Tensor Decomposition Based Mixed-Field Sensing for XL-MIMO AFDM Systems

Integrated sensing and communications enabled by extremely large-scale MIMO (XL-MIMO) and affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) is a highly promising paradigm for vehicular networks. However, the near-field spherical wavefront distortions induce severe non-linear parameter coupling, while the highly dynamic scattering environments exacerbate mismatch errors. To address these critical challenges, this paper proposes a novel tensor-based sensing scheme for XL-MIMO AFDM systems. First, the received signals are reformulated into a tensor, followed by an efficient decomposition approach that exploits the inherent Vandermonde structure of the factor matrices. This allows parameters to be directly estimated from the decomposed matrices, effectively avoiding inter-parameter coupling. Subsequently, a symmetric decoupling and real-domain manifold optimization algorithm is proposed for angle of arrival estimation, circumventing the high-dimensional searches typically induced by near-field effects. Furthermore, a baseband reconstruction and analytical gradient-based algorithm is developed to perform delay-Doppler estimation in the continuous parameter domain, fundamentally eradicating the grid-mismatch errors inherent in high-mobility scenarios. With these decoupled factors, the remaining unknown angle of departure can be readily extracted. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves orders-of-magnitude improvements in delay-Doppler accuracy and eliminates the error floors in angular estimation that severely bottleneck state-of-the-art baselines.

eess.SP

Radio Map Construction with Post-Hoc Location Calibration under Quasi-Static Positioning Errors: Joint Estimation, Performance Bounds, and GNSS-Based Evaluation

Radio maps enable environment-aware wireless and Internet-of-Things applications and can be constructed from location-tagged received signal strength (RSS) measurements collected by mobile devices. In urban environments, temporally correlated GNSS errors can shift an entire sensing trajectory, causing systematic spatial misregistration that is not mitigated by collecting more measurements. This paper presents a radio-map construction framework that uses the radio measurements themselves to calibrate erroneous location tags after data collection. The dominant positioning error is modeled as a sensor-specific quasi-static offset, which is jointly estimated with radio-propagation parameters in a Gaussian process regression (GPR) framework by exploiting complementary spatial information from distance-dependent path loss and spatially correlated shadowing. We establish lower and upper bounds on the conditional Bayes risk and show that, under a translation-invariant trajectory model, trajectory information alone cannot identify the quasi-static offset, thereby motivating the use of RSS-derived spatial information for calibration. Numerical evaluations across propagation conditions show that the proposed method reduces the mean squared error (MSE) gap from ideal GPR to approximately $3.26\mathrm{dB}^2$, compared with about $10\mathrm{dB}^2$ for position-error-agnostic and noisy-input GPR baselines. Evaluation using positioning-error models derived from smartphone GNSS measurements shows that the proposed method outperforms a KF--RTS trajectory-smoothing baseline despite unmodeled time-varying positioning errors, remaining within approximately $5\mathrm{dB}^2$ of ideal GPR at the median MSE. These results demonstrate that RSS measurements can serve not only as observations for radio-map reconstruction but also as spatial cues for post-hoc calibration of imperfectly geotagged sensing data.

eess.SP