Performance Analysis of Space Shift Keying with Amplify and Forward Relaying

In this letter, dual-hop amplify and forward relaying using space shift keying (SSK) is introduced. In SSK, information bits are mapped into a spatial symbol. The spatial symbol is the index of the active transmit antenna, where a single antenna is activated at each time instance. The relay amplifies the data received from the transmitter and forwards it to the receiver without any further processing. The receiver applies optimum maximum-likelihood detector to retrieve the transmitted information bits. In particular, an exact closed-form expression for the average bit error probability is given for the case of two transmit antennas. In addition, an upper bound is derived for an arbitrary number of transmit antennas. The analytical results are validated through Monte Carlo simulation results.