Space shift keying MIMO transmission with reduced pilot overhead

Space Shift Keying (SSK) is a novel modulation scheme based on multiple antennas, which relies on only one radio-frequency (RF) front-end at the transmitter. In SSK modulation, only the activated antenna index is employed for modulating the bit information. In this paper, a class of novel SSK schemes are proposed for enhancing the spectral efficiency by saving half of the pilot symbols, in the context of two transmit antennas. Specifically, first, only one pilot symbol is inserted to achieve the channel state information (CSI) of one transmit antenna. Then the CSI of the other transmit antenna is obtained by utilizing the received data and the CSI of the first antenna. Finally, the SSK modulated signal is detected with the achieved CSI of both transmit antennas. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is capable of achieving similar biterror ratio (BER) performance and improved spectral efficiency compared to its counterpart, by reducing the overhead of pilot symbols.