Polarization Shift Keying (PolarSK): System Scheme and Performance Analysis

The single-radio-frequency (RF) multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system has been proposed to pursue a high spectral efficiency while keeping a low hardware cost and complexity. Recently, the available degrees of freedom (DoF) in the polarization domain has been exploited to reduce the size of the transmit antenna array and provide 1 bit per channel use (bpcu) multiplexing gain for the single-RF MIMO system. Nevertheless, the polarization domain resource still has the potential to provide a higher multiplexing gain in the polarized single-RF MIMO system. In this paper, we propose a generalized polarization shift keying (PolarSK) modulation scheme that uses polarization states in the dual-polarized transmit antenna as an information-bearing unit to increase the overall spectral efficiency. At the receiver, the optimum maximum likelihood (ML) detector is employed to investigate the ultimate performance limit of the PolarSK. A closed-form union upper bound on the average bit error probability (ABEP) of the PolarSK with the optimum ML receiver is derived. Inspired by the analytic ABEP, a constellation diagram optimization algorithm is proposed. To reduce the computational complexity of the receiver, a linear successive interference cancellation (SIC) detection algorithm and a sphere-decoding (SD) detection algorithm are introduced. Through numerical results, performances of the proposed PolarSK in terms of ABEP and computational complexity are analyzed. Furthermore, the PolarSK is analyzed over measured indoor channels. Numerical and measurement results show that the PolarSK scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art dual-polarized/unipolarized SM schemes.