A novel OTFS-based directional transmission scheme for airborne networks with ISAC technology

This paper investigates the directional transmission scheme for airborne networks (ANs) with orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation, to cope with the degradations of communication performance due to the aircraft’s uncertain and high-speed mobilities. Besides showing better communication performance in high mobility scenarios such as AN, OTFS has also been verified for realizing the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems. In this case, this paper proposes a sensing-assisted beam prediction method by exploiting echoes to predict the next locations of moving aircraft, solving the beam rendezvous problem at the transmitter. Besides, for the data detection problem at the receiver, this paper proposes a novel pilot placement scheme relying on the predicted delays and Dopplers, realizing accurate channel estimation with lower overheads. Simulation results show that the proposed OTFS-based directional transmission scheme can achieve reliable communication performance with a low bit error rate.