Amplitude Phase Shift Keying-Aided Space-Time Block Coded Differential Spatial Modulation

In this paper, a novel design of amplitude phase shift keying-aided space-time block coded differential spatial modu-lation (APSK-STBC-DSM) is proposed. This design conceived not only maintains the diversity benefits of the space-time block coded differential spatial modulation (STBC-DSM) system, but also conveys extra information bits with the aid of amplitude phase shift keying (APSK), so as to enhance the transmission rate. Moreover, an improved low-complexity detector is also proposed, in order to achieve near-optimal detection performance. Ultimately, simulation results exhibit that the proposed APSK-STBC-DSM system is capable of providing significant bit error rate (BER) performance gains over conventional STBC-DSM and other differential spatial modulation (DSM) counterparts.

I. Introduction

SPATIAL modulation (SM) [1]–[3] is a recently developed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission technique, which improves energy efficiency and reduces the number of radio-frequency (RF) chains required compared with other conventional MIMO schemes, such as Vertical Bell Labs Space-Time (V-BLAST) [4]. Moreover, its characteristic of single-antenna transmission avoids issues such as inter-channel interference (ICI) and inter-antenna synchronization (IAS).