“Near-Perfect” Finite-Cardinality Generalized Space-Time Shift Keying

Two decades of full-diversity high-rate MIMO research has created perfect Space-Time Block Codes (STBCs), including the Golden code. However, the major stumbling block of their wide-spread employment is their limited energy-efficiency. On one hand, the superposition of their signals results in a high Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR). On the other hand, the total number of equivalent Inter-Antenna Interference (IAI) contributions that the receiver has to deal with is increased to IAI = M
²
upon using M Transmit Antennas (TAs), which is a substantial extra price compared to the IAI = M of V-BLAST. Against this background, we propose a new family of Finite-Cardinality Generalized Space-Time Shift Keying (FC-GSTSK). More explicitly, the proposed FC-GSTSK is capable of outperforming both V-BLAST and STBC, which is the ultimate objective of full-diversity high-rate MIMO design. Furthermore, following the index modulation philosophy, the proposed FC-GSTSK replaces the signal-additions by the data-carrying signal-selection process. As a benefit, the FC-GSTSK substantially reduces the PAPR of signal transmission. As a further advantage, the equivalent IAI imposed on signal detection is reduced back to the same level as that of the V-BLAST. Moreover, the proposed FC-GSTSK is even capable of consistently outperforming the perfect STBCs in terms of its Peak Signal to Noise-power Ratio (PSNR) that takes into account the power consumption at the transmitter. As a further advance, the reduced-RF-chain based version of FC-GSTSK is also capable of outperforming both Generalized Spatial Modulation (GSM) and Space-Time Block Coded Spatial Modulation (STBC-SM) without increasing the PAPR and the equivalent IAI.