Polarization signaling for wireless communication

This paper explores fundamental properties of wireless communication using polarization-based modulation. Channel models for polarization shift keying (PolSK) are developed assuming additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading; the resulting analysis of a maximum likelihood receiver yields a bound on the symbol error rate (SER) for PolSK that is approximately 1.0 dB tighter than the previously published bound. In addition, insight into the fundamental performance of polarization-based modulation is gained by computing a bound on achievable rate derived from the channel's mutual information assuming equiprobable inputs. Finally, it is shown how statistical and instantaneous channel state information (CSI) can be exploited at the receiver to form asymmetric decision regions and improve SER performance.