Novel space shift keying MIMO technique based on a Steiner triple system

Abstract

A novel space shift keying (SSK) multiple–input multiple–output (MIMO) technique based on Steiner triple system is proposed and analyzed in this article. SSK attracted considerable research interest in the past few years driven by the several promised inherent advantages including low error probability, low computational complexity and a very simple hardware implementation with very low cost and power consumption. Yet, the spectral efficiency of SSK increases with a base two logarithm of the number of transmit antennas and high data rates are only viable with a massive and impractical number of transmit antennas. Alternatively, generalized SSK (GSSK) scheme is considered, where a combination of antennas is activated at each time instant. GSSK promises the use of arbitrary number of transmit antennas not necessarily a power of two integer. Also, GSSK can attain high data rate with low number of transmit antennas at the cost of substantial degradation in the error performance. In this study, a Steiner triple system is utilized to propose a tailored SSK scheme with substantial reduction in the required number of transmit antennas, without compromising the error probability. It is shown that the proposed Steiner–SSK (S–SSK) MIMO system achieves almost identical error performance to a conventional SSK system but with nearly 90% reduction in the number of transmit antennas. As well, the average bit error rate (ABER) of S–SSK is shown to outperform GSSK by at least 3dB. It is also reported that a S–SSK system accomplishes significant reduction in hardware cost, power consumption, and computational complexity as compared to conventional SSK scheme. Yet, GSSK is shown to marginally outperforms S–SSK in these metrics as it requires smaller number of transmit antennas per a target spectral efficiency.