A sequential antenna-hopping scheme for high mobility MIMO communications

In high mobility wireless communication scenarios, the most challenging issue is to cope with the extremely fast fading channel. Compared with its static counterpart, channel estimation in high mobility scenarios consumes excessive energy and spectrum to achieve similar performance. To address this issue, we exploit delay correlation with sequential antenna-hopping (AH) to convert the rapid fading channels to a virtual slow-fading channel. As a result, robust communication can be achieved with much less channel estimation overhead even under high mobility. Finally, two important performance metrics, namely, channel estimation mean square error (MSE) and transmission symbol error rate (SER), are re-examined for this virtual slow-fading channel. Numerical results verify the good performance of the proposed scheme and elucidate its effectiveness in high mobility communication scenarios.