MIMO System with Relative Phase Difference Time-Shift Modulation in Rician Fading Environments

In line-of sight (LOS) environments, the performance of Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems depends largely on the difference of the phase difference of direct paths from transmit antennas to each receive antenna. When the phase difference of direct paths are close to each other, the spatial division multiplexing (SDM) channel is not orthogonal to each other so that the signal detection becomes difficult. In this paper, we propose a MIMO system with relative phase difference time-shift modulation (RPDTM) in Rician fading environments. The proposed scheme transmits independent signals from each antenna at each time slot where relative phase difference between signal constellations used by transmit antennas varies with a pre-determined pattern. This transmission virtually changes the phase difference of direct paths from transmit antennas to each receive antenna without lowering data rate and without knowledge of the channels. In addition, forward error correction coding (ECC) is applied to exploit the time slots where the receiver can detect the signals easily to improve the detection performance. From the results of computer simulation, we show that MIMO system with RPDTM can achieve the better bit error rate (BER) than the conventional MIMO system. We also show that the MEMO system with RPDTM is effective by about Rician factor K = 10 dB.