An Improved Matched-Filter Based Detection Algorithm for Space-Time Shift Keying Systems

In this letter, an extension of the near-optimal matched-filter (NMF) detector that provides improvement of the performance with negligible extra complexity is proposed for space-time shift keying (STSK) systems. In contrast to the NMF which only utilizes the index of the most probable active dispersion-matrix (DM) for detection, the proposed method sorts the DM index set and achieves the final results from the K most probable indices, so as to alleviate the error propagation caused by DM misdetection. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm provides considerable performance improvement for both hard and soft output detection as compared to NMF. Furthermore, it is also shown that the proposed detector is capable of achieving the same performance as that of the exhaustive-search MF (EMF) detector at reduced complexity, especially for high data rates.