Detection of space shift keying signaling in large MIMO systems

The detection problem of the space shift keying (SSK) signaling and its generalized form (namely, generalized SSK or GSSK) in the emerging large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems is discussed in this paper. First, we explicitly formulate the tree search and column search detection schemes achieving optimal maximum likelihood (ML) performance, and discuss their pros and cons in the context of large MIMO systems where the size of the GSSK modulation alphabet increases significantly. Secondly, we propose two useful suboptimal detection methods for large MIMO systems and large-alphabet GSSK signaling based on convex relaxation, which induce an approximately 2-4 dB performance penalty as shown through experimental results.