Modulation, Detection, and Performance for Noncoherent Massive SIMO Systems for Hypersonic Vehicle Downlink Integrated Channel

For hypersonic flight, high-dynamic plasma sheaths surrounding vehicles deteriorate communication quality. In this work, hypersonic vehicle downlink integrated channels that cascade the plasma sheath channel and Rice fading channel are first established, and the probability density functions (PDFs) of the integrated channel amplitude and phase are derived theoretically. Then, a downlink SIMO system over the integrated channel is considered, including a single antenna transmitter and a single ground receiver equipped with a large number of antennas. For this system, a noncoherent telemetry scheme is proposed, a transmitter that modulates information only in the power of the symbols, and an adaptive maximum likelihood (ML) receiver which demodulates symbols using the PDF of the average received power (ARP) across the antennas. Motivated by the efficient power utilization, an asymptotically optimal constellation design in terms of symbol error rate (SER) with an increasing number of antennas is proposed, under an assumption that CSI statistics are available. The PDF of ARP is well estimated by a reduced reversible jump markov chain monte carlo (RRJ-MCMC) algorithm and used for symbol demodulation and achievable rate derivation. The numerical results demonstrate that the optimal constellation scheme outperforms the amplitude shift keying (ASK) constellation scheme and is robust against the plasma sheath attenuation with moderate antennas or a large line-of-sight (LOS) component.