Differential STBC-SM Scheme for Uplink Multi-User Massive MIMO Communications: System Design and Performance Analysis

In this paper, a novel differential space-time block coded spatial modulation (differential STBC-SM) is proposed for uplink multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications, which combines the concept of differential coding and STBC-SM to enhance the diversity benefits in the absence of the channel state information (CSI). The transmission structure of the proposed system is on a block basis, where each block contains two sub-blocks. More specifically, the first sub-block only conveys amplitude and phase modulation (APM) symbol bits, since its transmit antennas (TAs) obey a pre-designed activation pattern, which do not carry any information bit. For the second sub-block, the input bits are modulated to STBC-SM matrices, which are then differentially coded between two adjacent sub-blocks. Moreover, a novel block-by-block based non-coherent detector is presented. Finally, we derive an upper bound on the average bit error probability (ABEP) by using the moment generating function (MGF). Our simulation results show that the proposed differential STBC-SM transmission structure is able to acquire considerable bit error rate (BER) performance improvements compared to both the conventional differential spatial modulation (DSM) and differential Alamouti schemes.