The spatial modulation (SM) concept combines, in a novel fashion, digital modulation and
multiple antenna transmission for low complexity and spectrally efficient data transmission.
The idea considers the transmit antenna array as a spatial constellation diagram with the transmit
antennas as the constellation points. To this extent, SM maps a sequence of bits onto a
signal constellation point and onto a spatial constellation point. The information is conveyed
by detecting the transmitting antenna (the spatial constellation point) in addition to the signal
constellation point. In this manner, inter-channel interference is avoided entirely since transmission
is restricted to a single antenna at any transmission instance. However, encoding binary
information in the spatial domain means that the number of transmit antennas must be a power
of two. To address this constraint, fractional bit encoded spatial modulation (FBE—SM) is
proposed. FBE–SMuses the theory of modulus conversion to facilitate fractional bit rates over
time. In particular, it allows each transmitter to use an arbitrary number of transmit antennas.
Furthermore, the application of SM in a multi-user, interference limited scenario has never
been considered. To this extent, the average bit error rate (ABER) of SM is characterised in
the interference limited scenario. The ABER performance is first analysed for the interference-unaware detector. An interference-aware detector is then proposed and compared with the cost
and complexity equivalent detector for a single–input multiple–output (SIMO) system. The
application of SM with an interference-aware detector results in coding gains for the system.
Another area of interest involves using SM for relaying systems. The aptitude of SM to replace
or supplement traditional relaying networks is analysed and its performance is compared with
present solutions. The application of SM to a fixed relaying system, termed dual-hop spatial
modulation (Dh-SM), is shown to have an advantage in terms of the source to destination ABER
when compared to the classical decode and forward (DF) relaying scheme. In addition, the
application of SM to a relaying system employing distributed relaying nodes is considered and
its performance relative to Dh-SM is presented.
While significant theoretical work has been done in analysing the performance of SM, the implementation
of SM in a practical system has never been shown. In this thesis, the performance
evaluation of SM in a practical testbed scenario is presented for the first time. To this extent,
the empirical results validate the theoretical work presented in the literature
