OTFS-Enabled Delayed SINR-Feedback Power Control for Reliable and Fair High-Mobility UAV Communications

Abstract

This paper develops a power control framework driven by delayed signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) feedback for orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications operating under high mobility, with reliability and fairness as the primary design targets.A base station with a uniform linear array serves several UAVs on a common OTFS frame, while the path delays, Doppler shifts, and inter-UAV interference are determined by the three-dimensional propagation geometry and the base-station array response rather than by a postulated coupling model. In place of instantaneous channel state information, the proposed controller refreshes the transmit-power vector from delayed SINR measurements alone, which matches the practical limitations of fast-fading aerial links. A prediction-smoothing-projection rule mixes a reliability share, a fairness share and a spectral-efficiency share, each normalized separately, so that the utility weights control the closed loop directly. Simulations show that the effective SINR of OTFS changes 37.8% less per frame than that of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) at 70 m/s under the same numerology, and that the resulting controller raises the average minimum SINR by 1.21 dB over equal power allocation at 40 m/s while lifting Jain's fairness index from 0.833 to 0.970, at a sum-rate cost of 24.6% that the utility weights keep under the designer's control. The margin of OTFS over OFDM within the same controller widens from 0.18 dB at 10 m/s to 0.81 dB at 90 m/s, showing that the waveform contribution to the usefulness of stale SINR feedback increases with mobility.