Spatial Scattering Shift Keying for mmWave MIMO Systems

This paper proposes a millimeter-wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission scheme termed spatial scattering shift keying (SSSK), which exploits spatial scattering modulation (SSM) to encode information through the indices of channel scatterers rather than conventional symbol constellations. The proposed SSSK achieves superior reliability compared to amplitude-phase modulation (APM) schemes, while simultaneously reducing hardware complexity. Specifically, the scatterer-index-based signaling mechanism mitigates the detection complexity inherent in APM systems by avoiding explicit symbol-level demodulation. In addition, we illustrate the advantages of SSSK by investigating the interaction between SSSK and fading channels. We derive closed-form expressions for the average bit error probability (ABEP) tight upper bound of the proposed scheme using two different approaches based on the greedy detection algorithm. To gain more insights, we further derive the asymptotic ABEP expression and diversity gain. To characterize the performance, we rigorously derive tight upper bounds on the ABEP using two complementary approaches: union bound and pairwise error probability analysis under a greedy detection framework. Furthermore, asymptotic ABEP expressions are established to reveal the achievable diversity gain. Moreover, we design maximum likelihood (ML) detectors with serial and parallel architectures and corresponding ABEP upper bounds. Simulations validate the analytical derivations and demonstrate SSSK outperforms APM in ABEP at high signal-to-noise ratios. The proposed greedy detector reduces computational complexity compared to the serial ML detector while maintaining comparable ABEP performance.