An Information-Guided Channel-Hopping Scheme for Block-Fading Channels with Estimation Errors

Information-guided channel-hopping technique employing multiple transmit antennas was previously proposed for supporting high data rate transmission over fading channels. This scheme achieves higher data rates than some mature schemes, such as the well-known cyclic transmit antenna selection and space-time block coding, by exploiting the independence character of multiple channels, which effectively results in having an additional information transmitting channel. Moreover, maximum likelihood decoding may be performed by simply decoupling the signals conveyed by the different mapping methods. In this paper, we investigate the achievable spectral efficiency of this scheme in the case of having channel estimation errors, with optimum pilot overhead for minimum mean-square error channel estimation, when transmitting over block-fading channels. Our numerical results further substantiate the robustness of the presented scheme, even with imperfect channel state information.