Spatially Modulated Orthogonal Space-Time Block Codes with Non-Vanishing Determinants

This paper proposes a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission scheme for M-ary modulations, called Spatially Modulated Orthogonal Space-Time Block Coding (SM-OSTBC), based on the concept of Spatial Constellation (SC) codewords introduced by Le at el. [1]. In the proposed scheme, transmit codeword matrices are generated by multiplying SC matrices with codewords constructed from Orthogonal Space-time Block Codes (O-STBC). The maximum spectral efficiency of the proposed scheme is equal to (n(T) - 2+ log(2) M) bpcu, where n(T) is the number of transmit antennas and M is the modulation order. The SC matrices provide a means of carrying information bits together with the O-STBC codewords and allow the SM-OSTBC scheme to achieve second-order transmit diversity by satisfying the non-vanishing determinant property. A systematic method to design the SC codewords for an even number of transmit antennas greater than 3 is presented. A single-stream maximum-likelihood (ML) decoder, which requires a low computational complexity thanks to the structure of the SM-OSTBC codewords and to the orthogonality of the O-STBCs, and a sphere decoder with further reduced signal processing complexity are developed. The bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed scheme is studied by using both theoretical union bound analysis and computer simulations. Finally, simulation results are presented in order to compare BER performance, energy efficiency and decoding complexity of the proposed scheme with those of several existing MIMO transmission schemes.