Space-Time Block Coded Rectangular Differential Spatial Modulation: System Design and Performance Analysis

In this paper, a novel scheme dubbed space-time block coded rectangular differential spatial modulation (STBC-RDSM) is proposed for multiple-input and multiple-out (MIMO) systems, which combines space-time block coding (STBC) and rectangular differential spatial modulation (RDSM) to reap their respective benefits while avoiding the drawbacks of conventional differential spatial modulation (DSM) systems. More specifically, in the proposed STBC-RDSM scheme, information bits are conveyed via the rectangular differentially encoded antenna index matrices, as well as the STBC blocks. Furthermore, a low-complexity detection scheme is proposed. Our simulation results demonstrate that STBC-RDSM outperforms its conventional DSM counterparts in various spectral efficiencies. Finally, a closed-form union bound on the bit error rate (BER) is derived and validated by our simulation results.