Reconfigurable Antenna-Based Space-Shift Keying (SSK) for MIMO Rician Channels

Abstract

In this work, we use the concept of the new emerging technology of reconfigurable antennas (RAs) in an effort to improve the performance of space shift keying (SSK). Indeed, the reconfigurable properties of RAs can be used as additional degrees of freedom to enhance the performance of SSK in terms of throughput, system complexity, and error performance. In this context, considering correlated and nonidentically distributed Rician fading channels, we propose a number of SSK-RA schemes using SSK with antenna-state selection while taking advantage of the effect of RAs on the multipath propagation channel. More specifically, based on the variation of the Rician $K$ -factor and the correlation coefficients with different antenna states, the proposed schemes jointly optimize the fading and correlation parameters to enhance SSK’s performance. In this paper, we analyze the performance of the proposed SSK-RA schemes over Rician fading channels in terms of average spectral efficiency (ASE) and bit error rate (BER). We also provide several simulation examples through which we corroborate these analytical results. The proposed schemes are shown to enhance the performance of SSK both in terms of ASE and BER. For the same ASE, compared to that of SSK, not only do the proposed SSK-RA schemes provide much better error performance, they also reduce the implementation cost and the overall system complexity considerably.