Single-RF spatial modulation requires single-carrier transmission: frequency-domain turbo equalization for dispersive channels

In this paper, we propose a broadband single-carrier (SC) spatial-modulation (SM) based multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) architecture relying on a soft-decision (SoD) frequency-domain equalization (FDE) receiver. We demonstrate that conventional orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)-based broadband transmissions are not readily suitable for the single–radio frequency (RF) assisted SM-MIMO schemes, since this scheme does not exhibit any substantial performance advantage over single-antenna transmissions. To circumvent this limitation, a low-complexity soft-decision (SoD) FDE algorithm based on the minimum mean-square error (MMSE) criterion is invoked for our broadband SC-based SM-MIMO scheme, which is capable of operating in a strongly dispersive channel having a long channel impulse response (CIR) at a moderate decoding complexity. Furthermore, our SoD FDE attains a near-capacity performance with the aid of a three-stage concatenated SC-based SM architecture