An Efficient Spatial-Amplitude Diversity Technique for Multicarrier On-Off-Keying Communication Systems

Although non-coherent multicarrier on-off keying (MOOK) is a relatively bandwidth inefficient technique, the simplicity of its transmitter-receiver pair and inherent coding ability make it a popular choice for a number of communication systems. This technique however is particularly susceptible to frequency selective fading channels which are often encountered in the wireless environment. The purpose of this paper is to investigate and analyze bandwidth efficient diversity exploitation techniques with the objective to enhance the performance and data throughput of MOOK transmissions. We first analyze the impact of using spatial diversity and then a novel spatial-amplitude diversity (SAD) scheme is introduced for MOOK systems. The simulation results provided show that the proposed technique can provide significant performance improvement in frequency selective fading channels and at no extra bandwidth degradation.