Differential space-time coding (DSTC) has received much interest as it obviates the requirement of the channel state information at the receiver while maintaining the desired properties of space-time coding techniques. In this paper, by introducing star quadrature amplitude modulation (star QAM) method, two kinds of multiple amplitudes DSTC schemes are proposed. One is based on differential unitary space-time coding (DUSTC) scheme, and the other is based on differential orthogonal space-time coding (DOSTC) scheme. Corresponding bit-error-rate (BER) performance and coding-gain analysis are given, respectively. The proposed schemes can avoid the performance loss of conventional DSTC schemes based on phase-shift keying (PSK) modulation in high spectrum efficiency via multiple amplitudes modulation. Compared with conventional PSK-based DSTC schemes, the developed schemes have higher spectrum efficiency via carrying information not only on phases but also on amplitudes, and have higher coding gain. Moreover, the first scheme can implement low-complexity differential modulation and different code rates and be applied to any number of transmit antennas; while the second scheme has simple decoder and high code rate in the case of 3 and 4 antennas. The simulation results show that our schemes have lower BER when compared with conventional DUSTC and DOSTC schemes.
展开▼
