AFDM-ISAC With Fractional Delay-Doppler Coupling

Abstract

Affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) is a promising chirp-based multicarrier waveform for high-mobility integrated sensing and communication (ISAC). Accurate angle, delay, and Doppler estimation is essential for AFDM sensing. Since target delays and Doppler shifts are generally continuous-valued, representing them on a discrete delay--Doppler grid causes energy leakage and peak displacement in the discrete affine Fourier transform (DAFT) domain. The AFDM chirp also induces delay--Doppler coupling in the DAFT-domain response. The resulting DAFT-domain matching-score surface exhibits a local ridge that is not aligned with the normalized-delay and normalized-Doppler axes. To address these issues, this paper investigates joint estimation of angle and continuous-valued delay--Doppler parameters for a colocated AFDM-ISAC sensing architecture. A transform-domain sparse sensing model is formulated from the fractional DAFT-domain response. Based on this model, a coupled-coordinate Newtonized orthogonal matching pursuit (CC-NOMP) estimator is developed. CC-NOMP uses the AFDM-induced coupling coordinate to parameterize the dominant local ridge. It combines coupled-coordinate Newton refinement with safeguarded updates, coupling-aligned delay refinement, and cyclic multi-target refinement to estimate angle, continuous normalized delay, and normalized Doppler. A deterministic Cramér--Rao bound and a dominant-order complexity analysis are also derived. Simulation results with continuous-valued off-grid target parameters show that CC-NOMP achieves lower delay and Doppler error floors than the considered baselines while maintaining comparable angle-estimation accuracy.