Power-Time Channel Diversity (PTCD): A Novel Resource-Efficient Diversity Technique for 6G and Beyond

Diversity techniques have been applied for decades to overcome the effects of fading, which is one of the most challenging problems in wireless communications due to the randomness of the wireless channel. However, existing diversity techniques are resource-inefficient due to orthogonal resource usage, or they have high-power consumption due to multiple antennas and RF-chains which present an insurmountable constraint for small devices. To address this, this letter proposes a novel resource-efficient diversity technique called power-time channel diversity (PTCD). In PTCD, interleaved copies of the baseband symbols are transmitted simultaneously with weighted power coefficients. The PTCD provides a diversity order of the number of copies by implementing successive interference canceler at the receiver. To achieve this diversity, no additional resources are needed; hence, spectral efficient communication is guaranteed. Additionally, the power consumption at the transceivers is limited since the PTCD requires only one RF-chain. We provide an information-theoretic proof that the PTCD could have any diversity order. Based on extensive simulations, we reveal that PTCD can also outperform benchmarks without any additional cost.