A Differential Modulation Scheme for MIMO Links with Distributed Transmit Antennas

This letter proposes a differential en/decoding scheme for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication links with distributed transmit antennas, in which neither the transmitter nor the receiver knows channel knowledge. The proposed scheme is based on the layered differential space-time codes we present. Simulation results show that the bit error rate (BER) performance is nonidentical in different channel propagation delay cases. The optimum delay time for two transmit antennas system, for example, is about 0.6T
_s
(where T
_s
denotes symbol period) when the links achieve better performance.