Single-RF Index Shift Keying Aided Differential Space-Time Block Coding

We propose a new single-RF Differential Space-Time Block Coding using Index Shift Keying (DSTBC-ISK), which is the first in the family of Differential Space-Time Modulation (DSTM) schemes that can simultaneously achieve the following three imperative objectives of (1) forming a finite-cardinality transmit-signals set under the matrix multiplications of differential encoding; (2) retaining a single-stream ML detection complexity that does not grow with the constellation size; (3) offering a beneficial transmit diversity gain over the recently developed Differential Spatial Modulation (DSM). In order to make a fair comparison, we also conceive a low-complexity single-stream detector for DSM, which does not impose any performance loss in comparison to the existing solutions in open literature. Furthermore, in order to improve the performance of finitecardinality DSTM schemes at higher throughputs, we propose to generalize both Differential Amplitude Shift Keying (DASK) and Amplitude Shift Keying (ASK), which form the generic multilevel-ring star QAM constellation that subsumes the existing two/four-level-ring DASK solutions as special cases. Although the DASK approach has been popularly used in DSTM schemes, we demonstrate that our generalized ASK technique achieves a higher capacity and a better performance in channel coding assisted systems. Moreover, since the employment of star QAM constellations imposes the ring-amplitude dependent signal power problem for detection, we further develop bespoke MaximumLikelihood (ML), Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) and Least Square (LS) detectors for DSTM using DASK/ASK, which exhibit different performance versus complexity tradeoffs. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DSTBC-ISK is capable of achieving substantial diversity gains over DSM without eroding its low transceiver complexity.