IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 12, NO.
4, APRIL 2008
Information-Guided Channel-Hopping for
High Data Rate Wireless Communication
Yuli Yang and Bingli Jiao
Abstract— In this letter, we introduce information-guided
channel-hopping, a new scheme for high data rate communi-
cation over Rayleigh fading channel using multiple transmit
antennas. This scheme is proposed based on the fact that the inde-
pendence character of multi-channel can be used as an additional
information transmitting channel, and the maximum likelihood
decoding can be achieved in a simple way by decoupling of the
signals conveyed by different methods. The analysis results prove
that the capacity behavior of this scheme is better than that of the
space-time block coding for more than two transmit antennas.
Index Terms— Capacity, multi-antenna system, information-
guided channel-hopping (IGCH), space-time block coding
(STBC).
I. I NTRODUCTION
I N [1] and [2], space-time block coding (STBC) is proposed
as a remarkable transmission scheme for the multi-antenna
system. It has an elegant mathematical solution for providing
full diversity over the coherent, flat-fading channels. However,
when the number of transmit antennas is more than two, STBC
incurs a loss in capacity[2][3], that is, its capacity is smaller
than the true channel capacity computed by [4] and [5]. The
main reason behind this is that the equivalent code rate of
STBC can not achieve the maximum possible transmission
rate for more than two transmit antennas.
In addressing the issue of high code rate, we proposed a new
transmission method for multi-antenna system, which allows
additional information is conveyed by the selection among
multiple independent channels and accordingly is named
Information-Guided Channel-Hopping (IGCH) scheme. In the
following sections, we will describe this transmission scheme
and its corresponding decoding algorithm in detail. The anal-
ysis results of the capacity behavior will show that IGCH can
be an alternative scheme in the multi-antenna systems with
more than two transmit antennas.
II. I NFORMATION -G UIDED C HANNEL -H OPPING S YSTEM
Consider an M × 1 system, i.e., a system with M transmit-
and 1 receive- antennas. Let hm (m = 1, 2, · · · , M ) be the flat-
fading channel coefficient from the mth transmit antenna to the
receiver. We always assume that the channel state information
is not known at the transmitter but completely known at the
receiver, and that all flat-fading channels in the system satisfy
Manuscript received November 25, 2007. The associate editor coordinating
the review of this letter and approving it for publication was P. Demestichas.
Y. Yang is with the Research & Innovation Center, Alcatel-Lucent Inc.,
Shanghai 201206, China. She was with the Department of Electronics, Peking
University, Beijing 100871, China (e-mail: yang yuli@hotmail.com).
B. Jiao is with the Department of Electronics, Peking University, Beijing
100871, China (e-mail: jiaobl@pku.edu.cn).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LCOMM.2008.071986.
1089-7798/08$25.00

c 2008 IEEE
225
the independent and identical complex Gaussian distribution
[3][4].
A. Transmission scheme
At the transmitter, the IGCH scheme prescribes the simul-
taneous transmission of two data streams: one is mapped onto
the index of the transmit antenna selected for transmission
(i.e., in a system with M transmit antennas, log2 M bits can
be used to choose which transmit antenna is transmitting
at each time slot), whereas the other stream is encoded
conventionally and radiated by the selected transmit antenna.
We name the former channel symbol and the latter radiated
symbol, expressed by x and xch , respectively, where xch ∈
{
h1 ,
h2 , · · · ,
hM } with
hm (m = 1, 2, · · · , M ) for the
index of the mth channel. If xch =
hm , x will be transmitted
over the mth channel, and therefore, the received signal will
be expressed by
y = hm x + nm , (1)
where x ∈ {s1 , s2 , · · · , sN } is the radiated symbol corre-
sponding to an N -point modulation constellation with symbol
2
power of σX , and nm is the received additive white complex
2
Gaussian noise with zero-mean and variance of σN .
B. The decoding algorithm
In the IGCH system, the task of decoding is to find not only
the radiated symbol but also the channel symbol mapped by
the selection of channel. Naturally, the maximum likelihood
(ML) decoding algorithm can be used to estimate the radiated
symbol and channel symbol simultaneously as following:
choose x̂ = sn and x̂ch =
hm if and only if
d2 (y, hm sn ) ≤ d2 (y, hm
sn
) , ∀m = m
, n = n
, (2)
where d2 (u, v) is the squared Euclidean distance between
signals u and v. However, when the number of transmit
antennas is fixed, the computational complexity of this de-
coding algorithm (measured by the number of multiplication
operations) increases exponentially with the number of bits
mapped onto the modulation constellation of the radiated
symbol, i.e., the number of multiplication operations in the
decoding is N M .
In order to reduce the computational complexity, the decod-
ing of IGCH scheme will be divided into two steps: firstly, the
candidate decisions are made in terms of


2 h∗m y
x̂m = arg min d s, 2 , m = 1, 2, · · · , M,
s∈{s1 ,s2 ,··· ,sN } |hm |
(3)
226 IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 12, NO. 4, APRIL 2008

6
where ∗ denotes the conjugate operator; and then, choose x̂ =
x̂m̂ and x̂ch =
hm̂ if and only if 2x1 STBC
5 2x1 IGCH

1% Outage Capacity (bits/sec/Hz)

m̂ = arg min d2 (y, hm x̂m ). (4) 4x1 STBC
m∈{1,2,··· ,M } 4x1 IGCH
4 8x1 STBC
When the number of transmit antennas is fixed, the computa- 8x1 IGCH
tional complexity of the two-step decoding algorithm is fixed, 3
i.e., the number of multiplication operations is 2M .
2

III. C APACITY A NALYSIS

1
In an M × 1 IGCH system, there are two independent
input signal spaces (i.e., the radiated symbol space X and 0
the channel symbol space Xch ) and one output signal space 0 3 6 9 12 15 18 21
SNR (Eb/N0: dB)
Y . So, the mutual information between the input and output
signal spaces can be expressed by [6] Fig. 1. 1% outage capacity comparisons between IGCH and STBC in M ×1
(M = 2, 4, 8) channel.
I (X , Xch ; Y ) = I (X ; Y |Xch ) + I (Xch ; Y ) . (5)
6
The randomicity of channel symbol makes each channel 2x1 STBC
have the same probability of 1/M to convey the radiated 5 2x1 IGCH
10% Outage Capacity (bits/sec/Hz)
symbols. With a given realization of the flat-fading channels, 4x1 STBC
the capacity of the first term in the right-hand side of Eq.(5) 4 4x1 IGCH
is [4],[5],[6] 8x1 STBC
8x1 IGCH
M 3
1   
C1 = max I (X ; Y |Xch ) = log2 1 + ρ|hm |2 , (6)
p(x) M m=1
2
2 2
where ρ = σX /σN is the average received signal to noise
1
power ratio.
In Eq.(6), to achieve the maximization of mutual informa-
tion as capacity, the radiated symbol, x, is constrained to 0
0 3 6 9 12 15 18 21
be the random variable from independently and identically SNR (Eb/N0: dB)
distributed complex Gaussian ensemble with the probability
Fig. 2. 10% outage capacity comparisons between IGCH and STBC in
distribution function (PDF) of [3],[4],[5] M × 1 (M = 2, 4, 8) channel.
 
1 |x|2
p (x) = 2 exp − σ 2 , (7)
πσX X Eq.(5) is calculated by

where | · | denotes the modulus operator. Thus, when the mth 
  
channel is selected to convey the radiated symbol, the received C2 = I (Xch ; Y ) 
p(x)= πσ12 exp − |xσ2|2
X X
signal will satisfy a complex Gaussian distribution with PDF
M

 
of   1 p (y|xch =
hm )
= p (y|xch =
hm ) log2 dy ,
1 |x|2 M m=1 y p(y)
p (y|xch =
hm ) = 2
exp − 2
, (8)
πσm σm (10)
where σm2
= |hm |2 σX2
+ σN2
(m = 1, 2, · · · , M ) denotes the where p (y|xch =
hm ) and p(y) are presented in Eq.(8) and
variance of the signal received through the mth channel. Since Eq.(9) respectively.
every channel is selected with the same probability of 1/M , In conclusion, with a given realization of the flat-fading
the average PDF of the received signal is channels, the capacity of the IGCH scheme is
M CIGCH = C1 + C2 , (11)
1 
p (y) = p (y|xch =
hm )
M m=1 where C1 and C2 are given by Eq.(6) and Eq.(10), respectively.
M   (9) Next, we will report the numerical results of capacity
1  1 |x|2 behaviors for the comparison between IGCH and STBC. For
= 2
exp − 2 .
M m=1 πσm σm the M × 1 channel case, STBC capacity is [3]

M

Therefore, with a given realization of the flat-fading chan- ρ  2
CSTBC = R · log2 1 + |hm | , (12)
nels, the capacity of the second term in the right-hand side of M m=1
YANG and JIAO: INFORMATION-GUIDED CHANNEL-HOPPING FOR HIGH DATA RATE WIRELESS COMMUNICATION
7
2x1 STBC
6
2x1 IGCH
Ergodic Capacity (bits/sec/Hz)
4x1 STBC
5
4x1 IGCH
8x1 STBC
4 8x1 IGCH
3
2
1
0 In this scheme, the selection of the channel among M in-
0 3 6 9 12
SNR (Eb/N0: dB)
Fig. 3. Ergodic Capacity Comparisons between IGCH and STBC schemes
in M × 1 (M = 2, 4, 8) channel.
where R is the equivalent code rate of STBC. For complex
signals, R = 1 only occurs in the two transmit antennas case.
If there are more than two transmit antennas, R = 1/2, and
only in the special cases of three and four transmit antennas,
R = 3/4.
To begin with, in Figs.1 and 2, we provide the 1% and
10% outage capacity comparisons between IGCH and STBC
in 2 × 1, 4 × 1 and 8 × 1 antenna cases. Furthermore, in Fig.3,
we provide the ergodic capacity comparisons between IGCH
and STBC in 2 × 1, 4 × 1 and 8 × 1 antenna cases. Here,
the outage capacity, Cout,q , is defined as the information rate
that is guaranteed for (100 − q)% of the channel realizations,
i.e., Pr (C ≤ Cout,q ) = (100 − q)%, and the ergodic capacity
is defined as C̄ = E {C}, where E denotes the expectation
operator and the expectation is with respect to the channel
realizations [7].
As shown in Figs.1, 2, and 3, IGCH capacity is smaller
than STBC capacity in the 2 × 1 channel case, and however,
is larger than STBC capacity in the M × 1(M > 2) antenna
cases.
Because the logarithm is a concave function over the
considered parameters, C1 in Eq.(6) is smaller than the STBC
capacity in Eq.(12). In addition, C2 in Eq.(10) is a small
increment to C1 , so IGCH capacity is not larger than STBC
capacity in the 2 × 1 antenna case. However, for the M ×
1(M > 2) antenna cases, the equivalent code rate of STBC is
only 3/4 or even half of the maximum possible transmission
227
rate, so its capacity can not achieve the optimal performance,
while the equivalent code rate of IGCH is increased due to
more additional information conveyed by the selection among
more transmit antennas. Therefore, IGCH capacity is larger
than STBC capacity in these cases.
IV. C ONCLUSION
Due to the capacity loss in STBC system for the cases of
more than two transmit antennas, the optimal design with
respect to capacity is still an open problem. Motivated by
this, a new transmission method named Information-Guided
Channel-Hopping (IGCH) scheme is presented in this letter.
15 18 21
dependent fading channels conveys log2 M bits of additional
information besides log2 N bits of basic information mapped
onto the conventional N -point modulation constellation. By
the capacity performance comparison between IGCH and
STBC, we show that IGCH capacity is larger than STBC
capacity for the cases of more than two transmit antennas,
because the equivalent code rate is increased in the IGCH
system and decreased in the STBC system with the number
of transmit antennas.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers
for their valuable comments to improve the presentation of
this letter. Thanks also to Dr. Xiaofu Wu and Dr. Meng Ma
for their help with the edit.
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