IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 11, NO.
9, SEPTEMBER 2022
Delay Alignment Modulation: Enabling Equalization-Free
Single-Carrier Communication
Haiquan Lu and Yong Zeng , Member, IEEE
Abstract—This letter proposes a novel broadband transmission
technology, termed delay alignment modulation (DAM), which
enables the low-complexity equalization-free single-carrier com-
munication, yet without suffering from inter-symbol interference
(ISI). The key idea of DAM is to deliberately introduce appro-
priate delays for information-bearing symbols at the transmitter
side, so that after propagating over the time-dispersive chan-
nel, all multi-path signal components will arrive at the receiver
simultaneously and constructively. We first show that by applying
DAM for the basic multiple-input single-output (MISO) com-
munication system, an ISI-free additive white Gaussian noise
(AWGN) system can be obtained with the simple zero-forcing
(ZF) beamforming. Furthermore, the more general DAM schemes
are studied with the ISI-maximal-ratio transmission (MRT) and
the ISI-minimum mean-square error (MMSE) beamforming.
Simulation results are provided to show that when the chan-
nel is sparse and/or the antenna dimension is large, DAM not
only resolves the notorious practical issues suffered by orthog-
onal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), such as high
peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR) and vulnerability to car-
rier frequency offset (CFO), but also achieves higher spectral
efficiency due to the saving of guard interval overhead.
Index Terms—Delay alignment modulation, equalization-free
single-carrier communication, OFDM, ISI-free communication.
I. I NTRODUCTION
INCE its introduction around 1960s, orthogonal
S frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) has been
gradually evolved as the dominant transmission technology
for broadband communication, with successful applications
including the fourth-generation (4G) and fifth-generation
(5G) cellular networks, and wireless local area network
(WLAN) [1]. As a digital multi-carrier technology, OFDM
enables high-rate communications while circumventing
the detrimental inter-symbol interference (ISI) [1], [2]. In
addition, adaptive modulation and multiple access can be
flexibly applied for OFDM. However, it is also well known
that OFDM suffers from some critical drawbacks, including
the high peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR) [3], the severe
out-of-band (OOB) emission [4], as well as the vulnerability
to carrier frequency offset (CFO) [5].
Manuscript received 26 April 2022; accepted 2 June 2022. Date of publi-
cation 8 June 2022; date of current version 9 September 2022. This work was
supported in part by the National Key Research and Development Program
of China under Grant 2019YFB1803400, and in part by the Fundamental
Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant 2242022k30005.
The associate editor coordinating the review of this article and approving it
for publication was E. Alsusa. (Corresponding author: Yong Zeng.)
Haiquan Lu is with the National Mobile Communications Research
Laboratory and the Frontiers Science Center for Mobile Information
Communication and Security, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China
(e-mail: haiquanlu@seu.edu.cn).
Yong Zeng is with the National Mobile Communications Research
Laboratory and the Frontiers Science Center for Mobile Information
Communication and Security, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China,
and also with the Pervasive Communication Research Center, Purple Mountain
Laboratories, Nanjing 211111, China (e-mail: yong_zeng@seu.edu.cn).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LWC.2022.3180736
2162-2345 
c 2022 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
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1785
During the past few decades, numerous efforts have been
devoted to addressing the above issues for OFDM. For
instance, the simplest method for PAPR reduction is ampli-
tude clipping [3]. As an alternative of OFDM without suffering
from the high PAPR issue, single-carrier frequency-division
multiple access (SC-FDMA) has been adopted by 4G and
5G uplink communications. Furthermore, to reduce the OOB
emission of OFDM, the windowing and filtering approach can
be applied [6]. Moreover, filter bank multi-carrier (FBMC)
has been extensively studied as an alternative to OFDM with
reduced OOB emission [4], [6]. More recently, to deal with
the severe CFO issue in high-mobility scenarios that are exac-
erbated at high carrier frequencies such as millimeter wave
(mmWave) and Terahertz communications, a new multi-carrier
technique termed orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS)
modulation was proposed [7]. However, such existing tech-
niques for OFDM and its variants either incur performance
loss or require complicated signal processing.
In this letter, by exploiting the abundant spatial dimension
brought by large antenna arrays [8], [9] and the multi-path
sparsity of mmWave and Terahertz channels [10]–[12], we pro-
pose a novel broadband transmission technology, termed delay
alignment modulation (DAM). DAM enables low-complexity
equalization-free single-carrier communication, yet without
suffering from ISI even in frequency-selective channels. The
key idea of DAM is to deliberately introduce appropriate
delays for the information-bearing symbols at the transmit-
ter side, so that after propagating over the time-dispersive
channel, all multi-path signal components will arrive at the
receiver simultaneously and constructively. Note that DAM is
most effective for systems with multi-path sparsity and high
spatial dimensions, which is expected to be the case for 6G
mmWave/Terahertz communication with massive/extremely
large antenna arrays. This is because when the spatial design
degree of freedom (DoF) is much larger than the number of
temporal-resolvable multi-paths, the propagation delay of each
path can be pre-compensated independently without affecting
all other paths, which makes it possible to perfectly align all
multi-path signal components at the receiver.
In this letter, the proposed DAM is studied in details for
the basic multiple-input single-output (MISO) communication
system. We first show that with DAM, an ISI-free additive
white Gaussian noise (AWGN) system can be obtained with
the simple zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming. In addition, for the
more general case when the ISI-ZF condition is infeasible due
to the insufficient spatial dimensions, or when certain residual
ISI is tolerable, the ISI-maximal-ratio transmission (MRT) and
the ISI-minimum mean-square error (MMSE) beamforming
design are studied. It is also worthwhile to remark that the
idea of path delay pre-compensation at the transmitter was
firstly proposed in our previous work [11] and [13], but only
for lens multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems.
Note that compared to OFDM and its different variants
mentioned above, the proposed DAM technique has several
appealing advantages. Firstly, it is a single-carrier broadband
 1786 IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 11, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2022

Fig. 1. A MISO communication system with delay alignment modulation.

Fig. 2. Transmitter architecture for delay alignment modulation.

transmission technique, which inherently avoids those notori- Denote by x[n] ∈ CM ×1 the discrete-time equivalent of the
ous drawbacks of OFDM, including the high PAPR, the severe transmitted signal. Then the received signal is
OOB emission, and the vulnerability to CFO. Secondly, as L
elaborated later in this letter, DAM can achieve even higher 
spectral efficiency, since it requires a guard interval only for y[n] = hH [n] ∗ x[n] + z [n] = hH
l x[n − nl ] + z [n], (2)
every channel coherence block, instead of for every symbol as l=1
for OFDM. Last but not least, DAM can be implemented with where z [n] ∼ CN (0, σ 2 ) is the AWGN. Denote by nmin 
even lower complexity than OFDM (let alone than FBMC and min1≤l≤L nl and nmax  max1≤l≤L nl the minimum and
OTFS), since delay pre-compensation at the transmitter sim- maximum delay over all the L multi-paths, respectively, and
ply means sequence shift of the information-bearing symbols. the channel delay spread is defined as nspan = nmax − nmin .
This also eases the signal processing and hardware complex- Let s[n] be the independent and identically distributed
ity of the pre-equalization techniques for channels with severe (i.i.d.) information-bearing symbols with normalized power
delay spread. Despite of such promising advantages, we do E[|s[n]|2 ] = 1. If the conventional signal-carrier transmission
not intend to claim that DAM can be used to replace OFDM is applied with f ∈ CM ×1 being the transmit beamforming
or other existing ISI cancellation techniques, since it gives the vector, the transmitted signal can be written as x[n] = f s[n].
best performance only for multi-path sparse channels. Besides, By substituting x[n] into (2), we have
DAM also faces its own challenges, such as its critical depen- L

dence on the channel state information (CSI), which deserve y[n] = hH f s[n − n 1 ] + hH
l f s[n − nl ] +z [n], (3)
further studies.  1  
l=1
desired signal   
II. S YSTEM M ODEL AND D ELAY A LIGNMENT ISI
M ODULATION where we assume that the receiver is synchronized to path
We consider a MISO communication system, as shown in 1. In this case, all the remaining L − 1 multi-paths cause
Fig. 1, where the transmitter is equipped with M antennas and the detrimental ISI. Various techniques have been proposed
the receiver has one antenna. The available bandwidth is B. to address the ISI problem, including time- and frequency-
Under the multi-path environment, the discrete-time equivalent domain equalization, spread spectrum, and OFDM.
of the channel impulse response can be expressed as1 In this letter, DAM is proposed as a novel technique to
L
enable low-complexity and equalization-free communication
 to address the ISI issue. With DAM, the transmitted signal is
hH [n] = hH
l δ[n − nl ], (1)
L

l=1
x[n] = fl s[n − κl ], (4)
where L is the number of temporal-resolvable multi-paths with
delay resolution 1/B, hl ∈ CM ×1 denotes the channel vector l=1
for the lth multi-path, and nl denotes its delay in terms of sym- where fl ∈ CM ×1denotes the transmit beamforming vector
bol durations. For multi-path sparsity channels in mmWave associated with path l, and κl is the deliberately introduced
and Terahertz communications with large antenna arrays, we delay for the symbol sequence s[n], with κl = κl  , ∀l = l  .
have M  L [10]–[12]. Note that the multi-path in (1) is The transmitter architecture of DAM is illustrated in Fig. 2,
defined in the temporal domain based on the resolvable delays, which can be implemented with low complexity since delay
while each multi-path may include several sub-paths that have compensation by κl simply means time shift of the sequence
a common delay but different angle of departures (AoDs), as s[n], and the path-based transmit beamforming can be imple-
As a result, hl in (1) can be in general
illustrated in Fig. 1.  mented similarly as standard beamforming techniques. The
modelled as hl = αl μ i=1 υli a(θli ), where αl and μl denote
l transmit power of x[n] in (4) is
the complex-valued path gain and the number of sub-paths
√   L   L
for the lth multi-path, respectively, υli = ςli e j φli denotes E x[n] 2 = E fl s[n − κl ] 2 = fl 2 ≤ P , (5)
the complex coefficient of the ith sub-path of path l, with
 l=1 l=1
μl M ×1 denote the AoD
i=1 ςli = 1, and θli and a(θli ) ∈ C where P denotes the available transmit power, and the first
and the transmit array response vector of the ith sub-path of equality holds since s[n] is independent across different n and
path l, respectively. As a preliminary study, the current work κl = κl  , ∀l = l  . By substituting (4) into (2), the received
mainly aims to reveal the fundamental performance limit of signal for DAM is
DAM by assuming perfect CSI. The CSI acquisition methods L
and the impact of CSI errors will be left in future work. 
y[n] = hHl fl s[n − κl − nl ]
1 In this letter, we assume the time non-selective channels. The proposed l=1
L 
 L
technique can be extended to the doubly-selective channels, by both delay and
Doppler compensation at the transmitter, which we will term as delay-Doppler + hH
l fl  s[n − κl  − nl ] + z [n]. (6)
alignment modulation (DDAM). l=1 l  =l

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 LU AND ZENG: DAM: ENABLING EQUALIZATION-FREE SINGLE-CARRIER COMMUNICATION 1787

L

It is observed from (6) that the introduced delay κl , ∀l ,
s.t. Ql bl 2 ≤ P .
impacts all the L multi-path signal components. By letting
l=1
κl = nmax − nl ≥ 0, ∀l , we have
  Theorem 1: For DAM, the optimal ISI-ZF beamforming is
L
 
y[n] = hH
l fl s[n − nmax ] √  L
l=1 flZF = P Ql hl  Ql hl 2 , ∀l , (11)
 L
L 
l=1
+ hH
l fl  s[n − nmax + nl  − nl ] + z [n]. (7)
l=1 l  =l
and the resulting SNR is
L

If the receiver is synchronized to the delay nmax , then the first
term in (7) contributes to the desired signal, while the second γZF = P̄ Ql hl 2 , (12)
term is the ISI. It is observed that the ISI cannot be completely l=1
eliminated by delay compensation alone. However, if {fl }L l=1 where P̄  P /σ 2 .
is designed so that Proof: This result can be obtained according to the Cauchy-
hH 
l fl  = 0, ∀l = l , (8) Schwarz inequality, which is omitted for brevity.
Theorem 1 shows that by applying the ISI-ZF transmit
then the received signal in (7) reduces to beamforming for DAM so that the ISI is perfectly elim-

L 
 inated, all multi-path signal components are beneficial for
H
y[n] = hl fl s[n − nmax ] + z [n]. (9) the SNR enhancement, instead of being detrimental. This
l=1 thus enables a new low-complexity single-carrier communi-
It is observed from (9) that the received signal is simply cation without having to perform complicated equalization
the symbol sequence s[n] delayed by one single delay nmax nor sophisticated multi-carrier transmission. Note that DAM is
with a multiplicative gain contributed by all the L multi- similar to RAKE receiver in the sense that they both achieve
paths. In other words, with the simple DAM in (4) and the coherent combining of multi-path signals. However, they are
ISI-ZF beamforming in (8), the original multi-path frequency- fundamentally different, since RAKE receiver relies on spread-
selective channel has been transformed to the simple ISI-free ing code that occupies bandwidth much larger than necessary
AWGN channel with a single delay nmax . Note that the ISI-ZF for the information signal, so as to separate the multi-path sig-
condition in (8) can be satisfied as long as M ≥ L, i.e., when nal components with high resolution in the temporal domain.
the channel is sparse and/or the antenna dimension is large. On By contrast, DAM resolves the multi-path signal components
the other hand, when M < L, the perfect ISI-ZF beamform- in the spatial domain without spread spectrum, and an ISI-
ing is infeasible. In this case, the low-complexity ISI-MRT free AWGN system can be obtained with the ISI-ZF transmit
and the optimal ISI-MMSE beamforming can be applied for beamforming. Besides, RAKE receiver requires more complex
DAM based on the input-output relationship in (7), which are signal processing than DAM at the receiver side due to the sig-
elaborated in the following. nal detection with multiple fingers [2], while the receiver of the
DAM only needs single-path detection without equalization,
III. ISI B EAMFORMING AND P ERFORMANCE A NALYSIS thanks to the delay alignment achieved.
Theorem 2: When the channel is sparse and/or the antenna
A. DAM With ISI-ZF Beamforming dimension is large so that M  L, the optimal ISI-ZF
In this subsection, we aim to maximize the received signal- beamforming and the received SNR respectively reduce to


to-noise ratio (SNR) of DAM subject to the ISI-ZF condi- L
tion (8) via optimizing the beamforming vectors {fl }L √ 
l=1 . The f ZF → f MRT = P h 
l l l h 2 , ∀l , l (13)
received SNR of (9) is
l=1
L 2 L
  
γ= hH f
l l σ2 . (10) γZF → P̄ hl 2 . (14)
l=1 l=1
By discarding those constant terms, the beamforming problem Proof: This result can be obtained due to the fact
can be formulated as 1 HH
a.s. a.s.
L 2 M l hl −−→ 0, as M → ∞, with −−→ denoting the almost
  sure convergence [14], which is omitted for brevity.
(P1) max  hH f
l l Theorem 2 is quite appealing for 6G communications
{fl }L
l=1 l=1
L with large antenna arrays and mmWave/Terahertz communi-

s.t. hH
l fl  = 0, ∀l = l ,
fl 2 ≤ P . cations, for which the low-complexity ISI-MRT beamforming
approaches the performance of the ISI-ZF beamforming.
l=1
Let Hl = [h1 , . . . , hl−1 , hl+1 , . . . , hL ], ∀l . The ISI-ZF con-
straint of (P1) can be equivalently expressed as HH l fl =
B. DAM With ISI-MRT and ISI-MMSE Beamforming
0(L−1)×1 , ∀l . In other words, fl should lie in the null space In this subsection, we study the more general case when the
of HH l . Further denote by Ql  IM − Hl (Hl Hl ) Hl the
H −1 H ISI-ZF condition in (8) is infeasible, or when the beamforming
projection matrix into the space orthogonal to the columns of design does not aim to completely remove the ISI, but rather
Hl . Then we should have fl = Ql bl , ∀l , where bl ∈ CM ×1 tolerate some residual ISI.
denotes the new vector to be designed. As a result, (P1) is Let L  {l : l = 1, . . . , L} be the set of all multi-paths,
equivalent to and Ll  L\l includes all other multi-paths excluding path
L 2 l. Denote by Δl  ,l  nl  − nl the delay difference between
  path l  and l. Then ∀l = l  , Δl  ,l ∈ {±1, . . . , ±nspan }. The
(P2) max  hHl Ql bl 
{bl }L
l=1 l=1 received signal in (7) can be written as

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 1788 IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 11, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2022

To obtain the optimal beamforming design for DAM, it is

noted that the SINR in (18) is a generalized Rayleigh quo-
tient with respect to f̄ , which √ is−1maximized by the MMSE
beamforming f̄ MMSE = P C h̄/ C−1 h̄ , where C 
nspan H σ2
i=−nspan ,i=0 ḡ[i ]ḡ [i ] + P I denotes the interference-plus-
noise covariance matrix. The resulting SINR is
Fig. 3. An illustration of the effective channel with L = 3 multi-paths, with
n1 = 1, n2 = 3, and n3 = 5. The delay spread is nspan = n3 −n1 = 4, and γMMSE = h̄H C−1 h̄. (21)
the delay difference i ∈ {±1, ±2, ±3, ±4}. For example, n1 − n2 = −2,
g1H [−2] = hH H
2 , and n1 − n3 = −4, g1 [−4] = h3 .
H
C. DAM Versus OFDM

L  In this subsection, we compare the performance between

y[n] = hH DAM and OFDM. Denote by Tc the channel coherence time,
l fl s[n − nmax ]
within which the channel is assumed to be unchanged. Let
l=1
nc ≈ Tc /Ts denote the number of single-carrier symbols
 L
L 
  within each channel coherence block, where Ts = 1/B .
+ hH
l fl  s n − nmax + Δl  ,l + z [n]. (15) Further denote by ñmax an upper bound of the maximum
l=1 l  =l delay over all channel coherence blocks, i.e., ñmax ≥ nmax .
Note that ∀l = l  , we
have Δl  ,l = 0. In order to derive For the proposed DAM, it is observed from (7) that to avoid
the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of (15) with ISI across different channel coherence blocks, a guard interval
residual ISI, (15) needs to be reformulated by grouping those of length 2ñmax is needed for each coherence block. Thus,
interfering symbols with identical delay difference since they the effective spectral efficiency of DAM with ISI-ZF, ISI-
correspond to identical symbols [13]. To this end, for each MRT and ISI-MMSE beamforming schemes in bits/second/Hz
delay difference i ∈ {±1, . . . , ±nspan }, define the following (bps/Hz) is
effective channel  nc − 2ñmax
RDAM = log2 (1 + γa ), (22)
H hH
l , if ∃l ∈ Ll  , s.t. nl  − nl = i , nc
gl  [i ]  (16)
0, otherwise. where a ∈ {ZF, MRT, MMSE}, and the guard interval
A simple illustration with L = 3 multi-paths is given in overhead of DAM is 2ñmax /nc .
Fig. 3. It is worth mentioning that for different multi-path pairs On the other hand, for OFDM with K sub-carriers, a cyclic
(l , l  ) in (15), their delay difference Δl  ,l might be identical, prefix (CP) of length ñmax needs to be inserted for each
as shown in Fig. 3 for i = − 2. Therefore, their corresponding OFDM symbol, which has duration (K + ñmax )Ts . The
interfering symbols need to be grouped. To this end, (15) is number of OFDM symbols for each channel coherence time
equivalently written as is nOFDM = nc /(K + ñmax ). Therefore, by applying the
 
L
 optimal MRT beamforming for each of the K sub-carriers,
y[n] = hH
l fl s[n − nmax ] the effective spectral efficiency of OFDM is
l=1
  K  
nspan
 L
 nc − nOFDM ñmax 1  pk h[k ]2
ROFDM = log2 1 + , (23)
+ glH [i]fl  s[n − nmax + i] + z [n]. (17) nc K σ 2 /K
k =1
i=−nspan ,i=0 l  =1
where pk and h[k ] denote the transmit power and the
Since s[n] is independent across n, the resulting SINR is frequency-domain channel of the kth sub-carrier, respectively,
 2
 L  and the optimal pk can be obtained by the classic water-filling
 l=1 hH l fl 
γ=  (WF) power allocation [2]. By comparing (22) and (23), it
 2
nspan  L H [i ]f   + σ 2 is observed that DAM not just avoids the practical issues of
i=−nspan ,i=0  
l =1 lg  l OFDM like high PAPR and severe OOB emission as well
f̄ H h̄h̄H f̄ as vulnerability to CFO with low-complexity single-carrier
=     , (18) transmission, but also significantly reduces the guard interval
nspan 2 f̄ 2 f̄
f̄ H H
i=−nspan ,i=0 ḡ[i ]ḡ [i ] + σ I/ overhead since nOFDM  1 typically holds.
where h̄ = [hT T T ∈ CML×1 , f̄ = [f T , . . . , f T ]T
1 , . . . , hL ] 1 L
∈C ML×1 , and ḡ[i ] = [g1T [i ], . . . , gL
T [i ]]T ∈ CML×1 . IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS
If √
the low-complexity ISI-MRT beamforming is applied, i.e., In this section, simulation results are provided to evaluate
f̄ = P h̄/ h̄ , the received SINR can be expressed as the performance of the proposed DAM technique. We con-
 2 sider a mmWave system with carrier frequency f = 28 GHz,
P h̄ the total bandwidth B = 128 MHz, and the noise power spec-
γMRT = nspan    2 . (19)
P i=−nspan ,i=0 ḡH [i ]h̄/h̄ + σ 2 trum density N0 = −174 dBm/Hz. The transmitter is equipped
with an uniform linear array (ULA) with adjacent elements
In particular, when the channel is sparse and/or the antenna separated by half-wavelength. The channel coherence time is
dimension is large so that all L multi-paths are well sepa- Tc = 1 ms, and the total number of single-carrier symbols
rated at the transmitter, we have ḡH [i ]h̄/ h̄ → 0, and (19) within each coherence time is thus nc = 1.28×105 . The num-
reduces to ber of temporal-resolvable multi-paths is set as L = 5, which
L are uniformly distributed in [0, τmax ], with τmax = 312.5 ns.
 2
γMRT → P̄ h̄ = P̄ hl 2 , (20) The number of sub-paths μl , ∀l , is uniformly distributed
l=1 in [1, μmax ], with μmax = 3. The AoDs of all the sub-
which is in accordance with (14). paths are randomly distributed in the interval [−60◦ , 60◦ ].

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 LU AND ZENG: DAM: ENABLING EQUALIZATION-FREE SINGLE-CARRIER COMMUNICATION
Fig. 4. Average spectral efficiency comparison for OFDM and DAM.
Fig. 5. BER comparison for OFDM and DAM.
Furthermore, the complex-valued gains αl , ∀l , are generated
based on the model developed in [10]. For the benchmark
of OFDM scheme, the number of sub-carriers is K = 512,
and a CP of length ñmax = 40 is used. The number of
OFDM symbols within the coherence time is then given by
nOFDM = (K +ñTc )T ≈ 231.
max s
Fig. 4 shows the average spectral efficiency over 104 chan-
nel realizations versus the antenna number M for DAM with
ISI-MMSE, ISI-ZF, and ISI-MRT beamforming, together with
the benchmark of OFDM scheme. The transmit power is
P = 30 dBm. It is observed that the ISI-MMSE and ISI-
ZF beamforming schemes for the proposed DAM give similar
performance and are slightly better than the ISI-MRT beam-
forming scheme. It is also observed from Fig. 4 that the
proposed DAM technique, though with simpler complexity,
still outperforms the classic OFDM, thanks to the saving of
guard interval overhead. Specifically, for the considered setup,
80
the overhead for DAM is 2ñmax /nc = 1.28×10 5 = 0.0625%,
231×40
and that for OFDM is nOFDM ñmax /nc = 1.28×105 = 7.2%.
Fig. 5 shows the bit error rate (BER) performance compar-
ison for OFDM and DAM with ISI-ZF beamforming by using
128 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and 256QAM.
The number of antennas is M = 256. It is observed that for
the considered setup, the proposed DAM gives comparable
performance or even slightly outperforms the classic OFDM in
terms of BER, yet avoiding the practical issues of OFDM like
high PAPR. The slight performance improvement is mainly
due to the saving of the guard interval overhead.
Fig. 6 shows the average spectral efficiency with ISI-ZF
beamforming under the presence of CSI errors by compar-
ing different pilot sequence length N. The block orthogonal
matching pursuit (BOMP)-based algorithm [15] is applied for
channel estimation, and the number of antennas is M = 64.
It is observed that with the BOMP-based channel estima-
tion algorithm, the average spectral efficiency increases with
the pilot sequence length, as expected. Besides, the proposed
BOMP-based channel estimation algorithm achieves the sim-
ilar performance of perfect CSI with N = 20 pilots, thanks
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1789
Fig. 6. Average spectral efficiency with different pilot sequence length.
to the multi-path channel sparsity, which demonstrates its
effectiveness.
V. C ONCLUSION
This letter proposed a novel broadband transmission tech-
nology termed DAM, by exploiting the abundant spatial
dimension of large antenna arrays and the multi-path spar-
sity of mmWave and Terahertz channels. DAM enabled a
low-complexity and equalization-free single-carrier communi-
cation, yet without suffering from the ISI issue. The proposed
DAM was studied for a MISO system, where ISI-ZF, ISI-MRT,
and ISI-MMSE beamforming were proposed. Simulation
results demonstrated the superior performance of the proposed
DAM technique than the classical OFDM, in terms of the
spectral efficiency and signal processing complexity.
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