Trellis coded space-shift keying modulation

A new multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission scheme named trellis coded space-shift keying (TC-SSK) is proposed in this paper. This scheme is obtained by the combination of trellis coding and SSK for a given spectral efficiency, number of transmit antennas and trellis states. A soft decision Viterbi decoder is employed at the receiver to decode the transmitted SSK symbols. Using systematic methods, new TC-SSK schemes are obtained for 1 and 2 bits/s/Hz spectral efficiencies. An upper bound for the pairwise error probability (PEP) of the TC-SSK scheme is calculated for quasi-static Rayleigh fading channels. Computer simulation results show that the proposed TC-SSK schemes achieve significantly better error performance than the uncoded SSK, and the theoretical error probability curves are in close match with the computer simulation results. Furthermore, TC-SSK provides an attractive trade- off between complexity and performance compared to the spatial modulation with trellis coding.