Differential space-time modulation with maximum spatio-spectral diversity

In this paper, we present a differential space-time-frequency (DSTF) modulation scheme for systems with two transmit antennas over frequency-selective fading channels. The proposed DSTF scheme employs a concatenation of a spectral encoder and a differential encoder/mapper, which are designed to yield the maximum spatio-spectral diversity and significant coding gain. To reduce the decoding complexity, the differential encoder is designed with a unitary structure that decouples the maximum likelihood (ML) detection in space and time; meanwhile, the spectral encoder utilizes a linear constellation decimation (LCD) coding scheme that encodes across a minimally required set of subchannels for full diversity and, hence, incurs the least decoding complexity among all full-diversity codes. Numerical results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed DSTF modulation and coding scheme, which compares favorably with several existing differential space-time schemes for frequency-selective channels.