Coherent and Differential Space-Time Shift Keying: A Dispersion Matrix Approach

Motivated by the recent concept of Spatial Modulation (SM), we propose a novel Space-Time Shift Keying (STSK) modulation scheme for Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) communication systems, where the concept of SM is extended to include both the space and time dimensions, in order to provide a general shift-keying framework. More specifically, in the proposed STSK scheme one out of Q dispersion matrices is activated during each transmitted block, which enables us to strike a flexible diversity and multiplexing tradeoff. This is achieved by optimizing both the space-time block duration as well as the number of the dispersion matrices in addition to the number of transmit and receive antennas. We will demonstrate that the resultant equivalent system model does not impose any Inter-Channel Interference (ICI), and hence the employment of single-stream Maximum Likelihood (ML) detection becomes realistic at a low-complexity. Furthermore, we propose a Differential STSK (DSTSK) scheme, assisted by the Cayley unitary transform, which does not require any Channel State Information (CSI) at the receiver. Here, the usual error-doubling, caused by the differential decoding, gives rise to 3-dB performance penalty in comparison to Coherent STSK (CSTSK). Additionally, we introduce an enhanced CSTSK scheme, which avoids the requirement of Inter-Antenna Synchronization (IAS) between the RF chains associated with the transmit Antenna Elements (AEs) by imposing a certain constraint on the dispersion matrix design, where each column of the dispersion matrices includes only a single non-zero component. Moreover, according to the turbo-coding principle, the proposed CSTSK and DSTSK schemes are combined with multiple serially concatenated codes and an iterative bit-to-symbol soft-demapper. More specifically, the associated STSK parameters are optimized with the aid of Extrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts, for the sake of achieving a near-capacity performance.