Performance of an SIMO FM-DCSK communication system

A single-input multiple-output (SIMO) architecture of the frequency-modulated (FM) differential code-shift keying (DCSK) modulation technique is proposed. The new scheme employs orthogonal Walsh functions at the transmitter, with parallel substreams transmitted with a single antenna to help achieve a significant increase of the data rate. Multiple antennas are used at the receiver end to form an SIMO structure so as to obtain a diversity gain. Simulation results demonstrate that at a higher signal-to-noise ratio, the proposed SIMO FM-DCSK architecture has an outstanding bit error rate performance, in contrast to the direct-sequence (DS) vertical Bell Labs layered space-time (VBLAST) scheme that uses a complicated Rake receiver and minimum mean-square error detection, at the same data rate over multipath fading channels. In particular, the new scheme does not require any prior knowledge of the channel states, exact synchronization, and the complex Rake receiver, making the proposed algorithm simpler and yet more efficient than the DS-VBLAST scheme.