Data Association for Moving Multi-Target Sensing With OTFS Signaling

Existing communication signal-based sensing systems mainly rely on the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technique due to its remarkable communication performance. However, extracting Doppler shifts from the received signal is not straightforward for OFDM and usually requires additional operations. The recently emerging orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation, which employs the Delay-Doppler (DD) domain for data transmission, can reveal the physical wireless propagation environments and provide the DD information directly. This paper investigates the moving multi-target sensing problem based on OTFS signaling. In particular, we attempt to tackle sensing and data association tasks concurrently by using the time delay (TD) and Doppler information from OTFS channel estimation. To this end, we formulate a mixed-integer optimization problem and approximate it as a convex problem. Simulation results has demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.