The system and method utilize design criteria and construction for signal constellations in communication systems, such as cellular telephony, that have imperfect channel state information at the receiver. The system and method assume an imperfect knowledge of fading channel state information (600B) and statistics of channel fading (600D) are used to encode additional information into the space-time matrix signal constellation as variations in amplitude of constellation (600E) points. In the preferred embodiment space-time matrix constellations and design criterion are based on the Kullback-Leibler distance between conditional distributions.