Aggressive Non-Orthogonal Transmission with DFT-s-OFDM for Direct Device-to-Satellite Communications

Abstract

Direct Device-to-Satellite (D2S) communications promise global connectivity to unmodified user equipment (UE), extending coverage beyond terrestrial networks. Realizing this promise is fundamentally challenging: severe path loss and limited UE transmit power push uplink SNRs far below terrestrial norms, while suitable spectrum remains scarce. Together, these constraints impose a spectral-efficiency (SE) bottleneck, and under such conditions the efficiency of the UE power amplifier becomes critical, jointly governing transmit power and battery life. To improve UE-side power efficiency, 3GPP has adopted Discrete Fourier Transform-spread OFDM (DFT-s-OFDM) as an optional uplink waveform, exploiting its substantially lower Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) relative to OFDM. To break the SE bottleneck, we show that aggressive non-orthogonal transmission, in which the number of concurrent users exceeds the number of receive antennas by more than 2x, can unlock substantial capacity gains that remain entirely unexploited. Realising these gains, however, requires receiver architectures that, to the best of our knowledge, have not yet been developed. DFT-s-OFDM intensifies the difficulty: the DFT spreading couples signal components across subcarriers, inflating the effective dimensionality of the detection problem. We address both challenges with a novel receiver design that jointly exploits the SE gains of aggressive non-orthogonal transmission and the power-efficiency benefits of DFT-s-OFDM. Simulations under realistic channel-estimation errors and high-mobility Doppler show that the proposed scheme achieves 2x the SE of baseline, surpasses recent nonlinear MIMO receivers by 40% at 15% of their complexity, and reduces PAPR by up to 6 dB relative to DFT-s-OFDM MIMO and 11 dB relative to OFDM.