Mm-Wave STSK-aided Single Carrier block transmission for broadband networking

Millimeter wave (mm-Wave) communications has been considered as a strong candidate for future wireless standards, due to the large available bandwidth in the order of gigahertz. As a result, a plethora of future services and application-oriented scenarios can be conceived, under suitable propagation conditions. Accurate physical layer (PHY) design plays a vital role in the deployment of robust transmission systems able to efficiently exploit the large bandwidth portions available in the mm-Wave frequencies. In this paper, we propose Space-Time Shift Keying (STSK) MIMO coding combined with Cyclic-Prefixed Single Carrier (CP-SC) block transmission for broadband data exchange over frequency-selective mm-Wave channels. STSK facilitates exploiting transmit and receive diversity resulting in enhanced performance, when compared with state-of-the-art MIMO techniques only relying on receive diversity, such as Spatial Modulation (SM). In this paper, we assess the performance of CP-SC-STSK and CP-SC-SM in the presence of phase noise and imperfect channel estimation, considering 2 and 4 elements MIMO systems and Line of Sight (LoS) indoor versus non-LoS (nLoS) outdoor 73 GHz multipath channels. We show that the STSK-based solution using MMSE Frequency-Domain Equalization (FDE) is very robust against the aforementioned impairments and clearly outperforms CP-SC-SM at the price of a slight increase of receiver complexity and a throughput reduction of 50% when 4 × 4 MIMO systems are considered.