Joint-Alphabet Space Time Shift Keying in mm-Wave Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access

Flexible modulation schemes and smart multiple-input multiple-output techniques, as well as low-complexity detectors and preprocessors may become essential for efficiently balancing the bit error ratio performance, throughput, and complexity tradeoff for various application scenarios. Millimeter-Wave systems have a high available bandwidth and the potential to accommodate numerous antennas in a small area, which makes them an attractive candidate for future networks employing spatial modulation and spacetime shift keying (STSK). Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) systems are capable of achieving an increased throughput, by allowing multiple users to share the same resources at the cost of a higher transmission power, or an increased detection (preprocessing) complexity at the receiver (transmitter) of an uplink (downlink) scenario. In this paper, we propose the new concept of joint-alphabet space time shift keying. As an application scenario, we employ it in the context of the uplink of NOMA mm-Wave systems. We demonstrate with the aid of extrinsic information transfer charts that a higher capacity is achievable when compared with STSK, while retaining the attractive flexibility of STSK in terms of its diversity gain and coding rate. Finally, we conceive quantum-assisted detectors for reducing the detection complexity, while attaining a near-optimal performance, when compared with the optimal iterative maximum A posteriori probability detector.