Mutual Superposition Transmission for Spatial Multiplexing OFDM Systems

In this paper, we propose a transmission scheme to obtain a diversity gain in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems using spatial multiplexing (SM) transmission. In multiple- input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission, SM is advantageous for high-speed transmission when the signal to noise power ratio (SNR) is sufficiently high, whereas transmit diversity is preferable to SM when SNR is low. That is, there is a trade-off between high-speed transmission and reliable transmission. In this paper, we propose mutual superposition transmission (MST) in order to realize reliable SM-OFDM systems without reducing the transmission speed. In the proposed MST, two data symbols of two different subcarriers are mutually superposed on respective subcarriers after being weighted. Since each of superposed symbols contains two data symbols and is transmitted on each subcarrier, diversity can be achieved. As a result, the proposed method achieves a reliable SM transmission. We illustrate three types of MST and verify their effectiveness. From simulation results, we can show that the SM- OFDM system with the proposed MST of Type 1 achieves a better error rate performance than its original system conditioned on the same transmission rate.