Affine Frequency Division Multiplexing For Communications on Sparse Time-Varying Channels

This paper addresses channel estimation for linear time-varying (LTV) wireless propagation links under the assumption of double sparsity i.e., sparsity in both the delay and the Doppler domains. Affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM), a recently proposed waveform, is shown to be optimal (in terms of pilot overhead) for this problem. With both mathematical analysis and numerical results, the minimal pilot and guard overhead needed for achieving a target mean squared error (MSE) while performing channel estimation is shown to be the smallest when AFDM is employed instead of both conventional and recently proposed waveforms.