Simplified Performance Analysis of Space Shift Keying Selection Combining with Reconfigurable Antennas

Space shift keying (SSK) is a modulation technique that uses the index of transmit antennas for information transmission. Realization of SSK transmitter requires only one radio frequency (RF) chain. But the number of transmitter antennas in SSK increases exponentially with spectral efficiency. The transmitter complexity of SSK can be reduced by employing media based modulation (MBM) since it uses the index of different mirror activation patterns (MAPs) of a single reconfigurable antenna (RA) for information transmission. At the receiver, maximum ratio combining (MRC) for SSK achieves diversity gain at the cost of number of RF chains as many as the receiver antennas. In order to reduce this complexity without compromise on the diversity gain, selection combining (SC) receiver based on RA for SSK (SSK-SC) is proposed in this work to reduce the number of RF chains and antennas to just one. For SSK-SC, the bit error rate (BER) expressions (union bound and asymptotic) are derived in simple closed forms. Based on the instantaneous BER, the outage probability of SSK-SC is derived. All theoretical analyses are validated with simulation results.