Space Modulation Techniques

Chapter 1Introduction

1.1 Wireless History

Wireless technology revolution started in 1896 when Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated a transmission of a signal through free space without placing a physical medium between the transmitter and the receiver [1, 2]. Based on the success of that experiment, several wireless applications were developed. Yet, it was widely believed that reliable communication over a noisy channel can be only achieved through either reducing data rate or increasing the transmitted signal power. In 1948, Claude Shannon characterizes the limits of reliable communication and showed that this belief is incorrect [3]. Alternatively, he demonstrated that through an intelligent coding of the information, communication at a strictly positive rate with small error probability can be achieved. There is, however, a maximal rate, called the channel capacity, for which this can be done. If communication is attempted beyond that rate, it is infeasible to drive the error probability to zero [4].

Since then, wireless technologies have experienced a preternatural growth. There are many systems in which wireless communication is applicable. Radio and television broadcasting along with satellite communication are perhaps some of the earliest successful common applications. However, the recent interest in wireless communication is perhaps inspired mostly by the establishment of the first‐generation (1G) cellular phones in the early 1980s [5–7]. 1G wireless systems consider analog transmission ...