Signal space diversity: a power- and bandwidth-efficient diversity technique for the Rayleigh fading channel

The increasing need for high data-rate transmissions over time- or frequency-selective fading channels has drawn attention to modulation schemes with high spectral efficiency such as QAM. With the aim of increasing the "diversity order" of the signal set we consider multidimensional rotated QAM constellations. Very high diversity orders can be achieved and this results in an almost Gaussian performance over the fading channel, This multidimensional modulation scheme is essentially uncoded and enables one to trade diversity for system complexity, at no power or bandwidth expense.