MC-CDMA aided multi-user space-time shift keying in wideband channels

In this paper, we propose multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA)-aided space-time shift keying (STSK) for mitigating the performance erosion of the classic STSK scheme in dispersive channels, while supporting multiple users. The codewords generated by the STSK scheme are appropriately spread in frequency-domain (FD) and transmitted over a number of parallel frequency-flat subchannels. We propose a new receiver architecture amalgamating the single-stream maximum-likelihood (ML) detector of the STSK system and the multiuser detector (MUD) of the MC-CDMA system. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated for transmission over frequency-selective channels in both uncoded and channel-coded scenarios. The results of our simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme overcomes the channel impairments imposed by wideband channels and exhibits near-capacity performance in a channel-coded scenario.