Design and performance of noncoherent massive SIMO systems

A system with a single antenna transmitter and a large number of antennas at the receiver is considered. For this system we propose a simple noncoherent communication scheme based on energy detection that does not require knowledge of instantaneous channel state information at either the transmitter or the receiver. We also propose a constellation design based on the minimum distance criterion for this system and present numerical results to demonstrate the performance of this scheme for representative fading and noise statistics. Moreover, we show that this constellation design has the same scaling law performance as a system with perfect channel knowledge at the receiver.