Binary Orthogonal-Division Dual-Carrier Modulation for Hypersonic Vehicle Downlink Massive 2 x M MIMO Systems With Noncoherent ML Detection

For reentry communication, the constellation rotation caused by high-dynamic plasma sheaths leads to unacceptable demodulation performances degradation for the quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signal. In this article, a noncoherent downlink 2 x M MIMO system over hypersonic vehicle integrated channel cascading the plasma sheath channel and the Rice fading channel is introduced, where each of the two transmitters has an antenna and a ground base station is equipped with a large number of antennas. For this system, a binary orthogonal-division dual-carrier modulation (BODM) method is proposed and an efficient noncoherent maximum likelihood (ML) receiver is developed without knowing the instantaneous channel state information ( CSI). If the channel parameters are available to transmitters, the optimal power allocation can be achieved by using the minimum Euclidean distance (MED) criterion. A brief discussion on how to extend these results to the multiple-carrier system is presented. Simulations demonstrate that the new system significantly reduces the average bit error rate (BER), the optimal power allocation scheme is far superior to an equal power allocation scheme, and the system is robust against the plasma sheath attenuation with moderate received antennas or large line-of-sight (LOS) components.