Design guidelines for spatial modulation

A new class of low-complexity, yet energyefficient Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) transmission techniques, namely the family of Spatial Modulation (SM) aided MIMOs (SM-MIMO) has emerged. These systems are capable of exploiting the spatial dimensions (i.e. the antenna indices) as an additional dimension invoked for transmitting information, apart from the traditional Amplitude and Phase Modulation (APM). SM is capable of efficiently operating in diverse MIMO configurations in the context of future communication systems. It constitutes a promising transmission candidate for large-scale MIMO design and for the indoor optical wireless communication whilst relying on a single-Radio Frequency (RF) chain. Moreover, SM may also be viewed as an entirely new hybrid modulation scheme, which is still in its infancy. This paper aims for providing a general survey of the SM design framework as well as of its intrinsic limits. In particular, we focus our attention on the associated transceiver design, on spatial constellation optimization, on link adaptation techniques, on distributed/ cooperative protocol design issues, and on their meritorious variants

Generalized Spatial Modulation in Large-Scale Multiuser MIMO Systems

Generalized spatial modulation (GSM) uses $n_t$ transmit antenna elements but fewer transmit radio frequency (RF) chains, $n_{rf}$. Spatial modulation (SM) and spatial multiplexing are special cases of GSM with $n_{rf}=1$ and $n_{rf}=n_t$, respectively. In GSM, in addition to conveying information bits through $n_{rf}$ conventional modulation symbols (for example, QAM), the indices of the $n_{rf}$ active transmit antennas also convey information bits. In this paper, we investigate {\em GSM for large-scale multiuser MIMO communications on the uplink}. Our contributions in this paper include: ($i$) an average bit error probability (ABEP) analysis for maximum-likelihood detection in multiuser GSM-MIMO on the uplink, where we derive an upper bound on the ABEP, and ($ii$) low-complexity algorithms for GSM-MIMO signal detection and channel estimation at the base station receiver based on message passing. The analytical upper bounds on the ABEP are found to be tight at moderate to high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). The proposed receiver algorithms are found to scale very well in complexity while achieving near-optimal performance in large dimensions. Simulation results show that, for the same spectral efficiency, multiuser GSM-MIMO can outperform multiuser SM-MIMO as well as conventional multiuser MIMO, by about 2 to 9 dB at a bit error rate of $10^{-3}$. Such SNR gains in GSM-MIMO compared to SM-MIMO and conventional MIMO can be attributed to the fact that, because of a larger number of spatial index bits, GSM-MIMO can use a lower-order QAM alphabet which is more power efficient.Comment: IEEE Trans. on Wireless Communications, accepte