MIMO Systems Based on Modulation Diversity

This letter proposes a new approach to achieve the maximum diversity gain in the vertical Bell Laboratories Layered Space-Time (V-BLAST) system over multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) Rayleigh channels. First, we will briefly review the modulation diversity scheme based on real-valued multidimensional rotated constellations that has been proposed to obtain high diversity orders for single-input single-output (SISO) systems. Then, this letter extends the modulation diversity scheme to V-BLAST MIMO systems in order to achieve the maximum diversity gain without additional power or bandwidth consumption. The proposed method is particularly suitable for MIMO applications which employ channel codes with high rate in order to support high spectral efficiency.