Differential Spatial Modulation with Gray Coded Antenna Activation Order

Differential spatial modulation (DSM) was recently proposed to overcome the challenge of channel estimation in spatial modulation (SM). In this letter, we propose a gray code order of antenna index permutations for DSM. To facilitate the implementation, the well-known Trotter-Johnson ranking and unranking algorithms are adopted, which results in similar computational complexity to the existing DSM that uses the lexicographic order. The coding gain achieved by the proposed gray code order over the existing lexicographic order is also analyzed and verified via simulations, which reveals a maximum of about 1.2dB for the case of four transmit antennas. Based on the gray coding framework, we further propose a diversity-enhancing scheme named intersected gray (I-gray) code order for DSM, where the permutations of active antenna indices are selected directly from the odd (even) positions of the full permutations in the gray code order. From analysis and simulations, it is shown that the I-gray code order can harvests an additional diversity order at the expense of only one information bit loss for each transmission with respect to the gray code order.