Enhanced space-shift keying (SSK) with reconfigurable antennas

In this work, we use the concept of reconfigurable antennas (RAs) in an effort to improve the performance of space shift keying (SSK). Indeed, the reconfigurable properties of RAs can be used as additional degrees of freedom in order to enhance the performance of SSK in terms of throughput, system complexity, and error performance. In this context, we propose a number of SSK-RA schemes using SSK with antenna-state selection while taking advantage of the interplay between RAs and the propagation channel. In this paper, we analyse the performance of the proposed SSK-RA schemes in Rician fading channels in terms of average spectral efficiency (ASE) and average bit error rate (ABER).We also provide several simulation examples through which we corroborate these analytical results. The proposed schemes are shown to enhance the performance of SSK both in terms of ASE and ABER. For the same ASE as SSK, SSK-RA schemes not only provide much better error performance but also considerably reduce the implementation cost and the overall system complexity.