One analog STBC-DCSK transmission scheme not requiring channel state information

Both the inherently wideband differential-chaos-shift-keying (DCSK) modulation and the space-time block code (STBC) are techniques that can mitigate the effect of multipath fading. By applying STBC at the chaotic segment level, a novel analog STBC-DCSK scheme is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme is a simple configuration that combines the advantages of STBC and chaotic modulation. Due to the very low correlation between different analog chaotic signals, the proposed scheme can remarkably suppress the inter-transmit-antenna interference so as to recover the desired information and to achieve the full diversity gain. The theoretical bit-error-rate (BER) performance and the highly consistent simulation results demonstrate that the STBC-DCSK scheme outperforms the conventional single-input-single-output (SISO)-DCSK scheme by about 5 dB at a BER of 10-4. The performance superiority of the proposed scheme is further demonstrated in a typical UWB channel by simulations. More importantly, the proposed scheme maintains the same low transceiver cost as the SISO-DCSK scheme. Consequently, this proposed scheme is a low-cost alternative for wireless local area network (WLAN) applications.