OTFS: Interleaved OFDM with Block CP

Orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation is a recently proposed waveform for reliable communication in high-speed vehicular communication scenarios. It has better resilience to inter-carrier interference (ICI) than orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). In this work, we describe OTFS as block-OFDM with a cyclic prefix and time interleaving. This interpretation helps one visualize OTFS in the light of OFDM as well as it also helps in analyzing the gain obtained by OTFS over OFDM. Further, we compare the performance of OTFS with its contender 5G new radio (NR)'s OFDM configuration of variable subcarrier bandwidth (VSB-OFDM) while considering practical forward error correction codes and 3GPP high-speed channel model. This provides realistic performance comparison, which is highly desired for technology realization. Considering practical channel estimation, we find that OTFS outperforms VSB-OFDM with 5G NR parameter by about 5dB. We also present results on peak to average power ratio (PAPR) due to specific pilot structure used in OTFS for channel estimation.