TY - JOUR
T1 - Affine Frequency Division Multiple Access Based on DAFT Spreading for Next-Generation Wireless Networks
AU - Tao, Yiwei
AU - Wen, Miaowen
AU - Ge, Yao
AU - Mao, Tianqi
AU - Tang, Yanqun
AU - Doosti-Aref, Abed
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2002-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2026
Y1 - 2026
N2 - Affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) exhibits strong robustness against time and frequency dispersion in doubly dispersive channels (DDCs), enabling reliable communication under high mobilities. However, in the multi-user uplink scenario, inter-user channel delay and Doppler differences in the discrete affine Fourier transform (DAFT) domain manifest as inevitable multi-user interference (MUI). To address this issue, building upon the DAFT and AFDM, we propose a novel uplink multiple access scheme termed as DAFT-spread affine frequency division multiple access (DAFT-s-AFDMA). In our proposed scheme, DAFT spreading is performed by each user to multiplex the transmitted symbols over the DAFT domain, which includes a pre-chirp parameter that can be flexibly adjusted to reduce the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of the AFDM system. Accordingly, we derive new guidelines for setting the DAFT parameters and the asymptotically tight upper bounds on the average bit error rate, revealing the insights of PAPR reduction. Furthermore, a low-complexity cross-domain expectation propagation (CD-EP) detector is proposed, capitalizing on the sparsity of DAFT domain effective channel matrix and the corresponding symbol domain constellation constraints to enhance the error performance. Simulation results show that the proposed CD-EP detector outperforms both conventional Gaussian message passing (GMP) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) detectors with a much lower complexity, and also verify the superiority of DAFT-s-AFDMA to plain AFDMA across various scenarios of high-mobility DDCs.
AB - Affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) exhibits strong robustness against time and frequency dispersion in doubly dispersive channels (DDCs), enabling reliable communication under high mobilities. However, in the multi-user uplink scenario, inter-user channel delay and Doppler differences in the discrete affine Fourier transform (DAFT) domain manifest as inevitable multi-user interference (MUI). To address this issue, building upon the DAFT and AFDM, we propose a novel uplink multiple access scheme termed as DAFT-spread affine frequency division multiple access (DAFT-s-AFDMA). In our proposed scheme, DAFT spreading is performed by each user to multiplex the transmitted symbols over the DAFT domain, which includes a pre-chirp parameter that can be flexibly adjusted to reduce the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of the AFDM system. Accordingly, we derive new guidelines for setting the DAFT parameters and the asymptotically tight upper bounds on the average bit error rate, revealing the insights of PAPR reduction. Furthermore, a low-complexity cross-domain expectation propagation (CD-EP) detector is proposed, capitalizing on the sparsity of DAFT domain effective channel matrix and the corresponding symbol domain constellation constraints to enhance the error performance. Simulation results show that the proposed CD-EP detector outperforms both conventional Gaussian message passing (GMP) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) detectors with a much lower complexity, and also verify the superiority of DAFT-s-AFDMA to plain AFDMA across various scenarios of high-mobility DDCs.
KW - Affine frequency division multiplexing
KW - DAFT domain
KW - DAFT spreading
KW - doubly dispersive channels
KW - multi-user interference
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105018095509
U2 - 10.1109/TWC.2025.3612880
DO - 10.1109/TWC.2025.3612880
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:105018095509
SN - 1536-1276
VL - 25
SP - 4626
EP - 4641
JO - IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
JF - IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
ER -