| Abstract: | In space shift keying (SSK), all information bits are transmitted by antenna indices rather than transmitting symbols. To obtain high spectral efficiency, exponentially increasing number of antennas is used, which is generally not practical. Less number of antennas can only be possible by using more than one active antenna, such as generalized SSK, but this type of solutions result in excessive degradation in bit error ratio in correlated channels. In this study, variable number of active antennas for each codeword is proposed and called variable antenna‐SSK. First of all, pairwise error probability is obtained for variable number of antennas in the case of correlated channels. Then, to reduce the correlation effect, a novel antenna codeword construction method that minimizes the pairwise error probability is introduced for exponentially correlated channels. Codeword sets are obtained for k = 3 and 8 bits/s/Hz for 7 and 13 transmit antennas. Simulation results show that variable antenna‐SSK gets better performance according to its counterparts with increasing effect of correlation. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
