In order to fulfil the explosive demand for convenient wireless data access, novel wireless technologies such as the multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) have widely been used to improve the link reliability and capacity of wireless communication systems. In recent years, a new MIMO technology named the spatial modulation (SM) has attracted signi cant research interest due to its reported enhancement on the system performance with the reasonable system complexity. Before a new technology comes into real use, it is necessary to comprehensively evaluate its performance under different scenarios. In this thesis, we investigate the performance of SM systems under some important realistic scenarios for future wireless communications, such as the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), the high-speed train (HST), and the massive MIMO scenarios. Firstly, the bit error rate (BER) performance of SM systems under a novel threedimensional (3D) geometry based stochastic model (GBSM) for V2V MIMO channels is investigated by both theoretical analysis and system simulations. The impacts of vehicle tra c density (VTD), Doppler effect, and 3D feature on the BER performance of SM systems are thoroughly studied. In addition, other MIMO technologies, such as the vertical Bell Labs layered space-time (V-BLAST), the Alamouti scheme are compared with SM under different simulation settings. Secondly, the BER performance of SM systems is studied under a non-stationary wideband HST GBSM considering the non-ideal channel estimation case. The timevarying behaviour of the channel and its impact on the performance of SM systems are comprehensively investigated. The accurate theoretical BER expression of SM systems under a non-stationary wideband HST channels with non-ideal channel estimation is derived. A novel statistic property named stationary interval in terms of the space-time correlation function (STCF) is introduced in order to clearly explain all theoretical and simulation results. Thirdly, the performance of SM systems is evaluated under a Kroneck-based massive MIMO channel model. As a massive MIMO system employs large numbers of antennas, antenna elements are distributed over a wide range. Thus, different antenna elements may observe different sets of clusters. How this phenomenon affects the performance of SM systems is investigated by considering a survival probability of clusters, which abstracts the birth-death process of each cluster in the channel model. Moreover, the performance of SM systems is also compared with that of other MIMO technologies under the massive MIMO channel model. In summary, all research works in this thesis have considered realistic MIMO channel models, which are meaningful for the test, performance evaluation, and implementation of SM technology for future advanced wireless communications systems
