HDM: Hyper-Dimensional Modulation for Robust Low-Power Communications

This paper introduces hyper-dimensional modulation (HDM), a new class of practical modulation scheme for robust communication among low-power low-complexity devices. Unlike conventional orthogonal modulations, HDM conveys numerous information bits per symbol by combining hyper-dimensional vectors that are not strictly orthogonal to each other. Information bits are spread across many elements in the hyper-dimensional vector, thus HDM is tolerant of element-wise failures in high noise channels. Evaluation results confirm that uncoded HDM with 256-dimension exhibits the bit error rate (BER) comparable to that of low-density parity check (LDPC) and Polar codes, while HDM demodulation complexity is lower than that of LDPC and Polar decoders for the same block length of 256. Moreover, HDM provides graceful tradeoffs between datarate and signal-to-noise ratio for robust short message communications among power- and complexity-constrained devices.