Spatial modulation for multiple-antenna wireless systems: a survey

Multiple-antenna techniques constitute a key technology for modern wireless communications, which establishes a trade-off between the data reliability and the data rate, and which may result in an increased system complexity and cost. Among the many transmission architectures which exploit multiple-antenna at either the transmitter, the receiver, or both, spatial modulation (SM) is a novel and recently proposed multiple-antennas transmission technique which can offer, with a very low system complexity, improved data rates compared to Single Input Single Output (SISO) systems, and robust error performance even in correlated channel environments. This is achieved by adopting a simple but effective coding mechanism that sets a one-to-one mapping between blocks of information bits to be transmitted and the spatial positions of the active antenna in the antenna array. The main goal of this work is to analyse the viability of spatial modulation as a technology to implement and support future 5G systems that are currently being developed. Since these systems will be deployed in frequency selective channels resulting from the targeted high data rates, and in the presence of multiple users, techniques such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and code division multiple access (CDMA) may be involved. Hence, our objective is to investigate the performance of SM-CDMA and SM-OFDM-CDMA architectures in such frequency selective channels.

In this paper, a new multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission technique, which is called double spatial modulation (DSM), is proposed as a new high-rate generalized spatial modulation (SM) scheme. DSM scheme aims to improve the spectral efficiency of classical SM by increasing the number of active transmit antennas. In the DSM scheme, incoming data bits determine two modulated symbols as well as their corresponding activated transmit antenna indices. One of the modulated symbols is directly transmitted over its corresponding activated transmit antenna, while the other one is transmitted with a rotation angle, which is optimized for M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) signal constellation, over the second activated transmit antenna. The error performance of the proposed DSM scheme is compared with the recently proposed emerging SM schemes such as quadrature SM (QSM) and enhanced SM (ESM). Our computer simulations show that the DSM scheme provides considerably better error performance than QSM and ESM schemes for different spectral efficiency values. In addition, the pairwise error probability (PEP) of DSM is derived and the average bit error probability (ABEP) over uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channels is obtained for different M-QAM constellations.

Spatial modulation (SM) is a transmission scheme that uses multiple transmit antennas but only one transmit RF chain. At each time instant, only one among the transmit antennas will be active and the others remain silent. The index of the active transmit antenna will also convey information bits in addition to the information bits conveyed through modulation symbols. Pseudo-random phase precoding (PRPP) is a technique that can achieve high diversity orders even in single antenna systems without the need for channel state information at the transmitter and transmit power control. In this paper, we exploit the advantages of both SM and PRPP simultaneously. We propose a pseudo-random phase precoded SM (PRPP-SM) scheme, where both the modulation bits and the antenna index bits are precoded by pseudo-random phases. The proposed PRPP-SM system gives significant performance gains over SM system without PRPP and PRPP system without SM. Since maximum likelihood (ML) detection becomes exponentially complex in large dimensions, we propose a low complexity local search based detection (LSD) algorithm suited for PRPP-SM systems with large precoder sizes. Our simulation results show that with 4 transmit antennas, 1 receive antenna, 5 × 20 pseudo-random phase precoder matrix and BPSK modulation, the performance of PRPP-SM using ML detection is better than SM without PRPP with ML detection by about 9 dB at 102 BER. This performance advantage gets even better for large precoding sizes. We also propose a precoder index modulation (PIM) scheme, which conveys additional information bits through the choice of a precoding matrix among a set of pre-determined PRPP matrices. Finally, combining the PIM and PRPP-SM schemes, we propose a PIM-SM scheme which conveys bits through both antenna index as well as precoder index.

Novel incremental relaying protocol based on spatial modulation

Massive multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) systems with hundreds of correlated antennas at base station are capable of offering abundant spatial resources. When spatial‐domain modulation is applied to these systems, the spatial modulation (SM) using only one radiofrequency chain benefits practical implementation, but suffers from significantly reduced multiplexing gain offered by the massive number of antennas. By contrast, the generalised SM (GSM) allows to simultaneously activate multiple transmit antennas, which improves spatial multiplexing gain, but degrades the achievable error performance, as its design pays no attention to the antenna correlation. The authors propose an antenna grouped SM (GrSM) scheme, which is capable of circumventing the shortcomings of both the SM and GSM schemes suffered in massive MIMO scenarios. In the proposed GrSM scheme, transmit antennas are partitioned into multiple groups, where the relatively strongly correlated antennas within individual groups are used to implement component SM schemes, while the relatively weakly correlated antennas in different groups are beneficial to obtain multiplexing gain. In order to further improve the spectral efficiency, adaptive modulation is integrated with GrSM to form the adaptive GrSM (AGrSM). The achievable error and spectral efficiency performance of GrSM and AGrSM systems are investigated based on both mathematical analysis and Monte‐Carlo simulations, which are also compared with that of the conventional SM and GSM schemes, when massive MIMO communication scenarios are considered. Their studies and performance results show that GrSM is a promising transmit scheme for massive MIMO, which can outperform both the SM and GSM schemes.

In this chapter, the fundamental concepts of spatial modulation are introduced. We start in Chapter 2.1 with the channel models, i.e. the AWGN channel and the MIMO Rayleigh fading channel. The AWGN channel is employed in Chapter 3 to compare different signal constellations, whereas the Rayleigh fading channel is used for all MIMO transmission schemes. In Section 2.2, we discuss various spatial modulation transmission schemes from the literature, including spatial modulation, generalized spatial modulation, generalized multistream spatial modulation and the most recently-introduced spatial permutation modulation.

This work presents an integrated framework that combines polar coding, spatial modulation, and symbol‐level guessing random additive noise decoding (symbol‐level GRAND) aided detection to enhance the reliability and latency performance of CRC‐aided polar codes in 6G ultrareliable low‐latency communication (URLLC) scenarios. The proposed polar‐coded spatial modulation (PCSM) scheme utilizes (CA‐polar) codes to encode information bits transmitted as antenna index and symbol bits over a MIMO Rayleigh fading channel. The receiver employs a two‐stage detection scheme comprising initial spatial signal processing for antenna and symbol detection, followed by symbol refinement through symbol‐level GRAND with final error correction achieved with CRC‐aided successive cancellation list (CA‐SCL) decoding. A sequential detection and decoding strategy is adopted, in which symbol‐level GRAND refines the detected bits before CA‐SCL polar decoding, reducing error propagation into the polar decoder and thereby lowering the overall decoding complexity. Performance of the scheme is evaluated for polar codeword length of 128 bits for modulation orders of 16‐QAM and 64‐QAM, highlighting the scheme's parametric flexibility under short codeword constraints. Simulations carried out in MATLAB demonstrate that error correction with symbol‐level GRAND‐aided detection achieves an improved bit error rate (BER) and a lower system complexity facilitating real‐time hardware realization.

Cooperative communications with spatial modulation (SM) scheme have been studied for high speed and reliable wireless transmission systems. For common SM technique, the transmit antenna is selected by the input information bits randomly. However, the real channel condition corresponding to the active antenna determines the performance of SM system directly. SM-index modulation (SM-IM) scheme can modulate the index of the active transmit antenna and the modulated SM symbol into a new transmit symbol, which can be employed to get rid of the poor channel conditions' impact on the performance of SM systems. To further improve the system performance, we propose a cooperative communication system based on SM-IM scheme in this paper, which can avoid the disadvantages of the poor channel allocation of the cooperative SM system. Closed-form expression of the average bit error rate (BER) of the proposed SM-IM cooperative system is derived. Simulation results and analysis show that the proposed scheme outperforms the typical dual-hop SM cooperative system significantly.

In this paper, we investigate the performance of a spatial modulation scheme that combines the energy efficiency of pulse position modulation (PPM) with the spectral efficiency of generalized space shift keying (GSSK) for optical wireless communication system. The combined scheme is called generalized spatial pulse position modulation (GSPPM). We present the error performance analysis and validate the results through simulation. Error performance results show that the upper bound derived in the theoretical analysis is tight for all cases when the symbol error rate is below 0.1. The influence of parameters such as channel path gain and number of PPM slots on GSPPM's performance is illustrated. GSPPM is compared with some of the existing spatial modulation techniques, and results show that GSPPM provides an attractive trade-off between energy and spectral efficiency.

Multiantenna transmission using load modulated arrays (LMAs) is gaining recent research interest. LMAs use a single central power amplifier and tune the antenna loads according to the information signal. In this paper, we propose a novel multiantenna transmitter architecture that can enable high-rate transmissions using LMAs. The proposed architecture uses channel modulation with RF mirrors in conjunction with antenna load modulation to transmit information bits. The proposed architecture has two key advantages: 1) it facilitates simple construction of high-rate signal sets suited for LMAs, and 2) it requires significantly fewer channel coefficients to be estimated at the receiver compared to conventional channel modulation architectures. The proposed architecture is shown to achieve improved bit error performance compared to conventional load modulation as well as spatial modulation, which are also single power amplifier transmission schemes. We also investigate the use of the proposed transmission scheme in a multiuser setting on the uplink. The proposed scheme not only offers the advantage of RF hardware simplicity at the user equipment but also requires fewer receive antennas at the base station to achieve a target bit error performance.

A novel multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) transmission scheme termed as generalized quadrature spatial modulation (G-QSM) is proposed. It amalgamates the concept of quadrature spatial modulation (QSM) and spatial multiplexing for the sake of achieving a high throughput, despite relying on a low number of radio frequency (RF) chains. In the proposed G-QSM scheme, the conventional constellation points of the spatial multiplexing structure are replaced by the QSM symbols, hence the information bits are conveyed both by the antenna indices as well as by the classic amplitude/phase modulated (APM) constellation points. The upper bounds of the average bit error probability (ABEP) of the proposed G-QSM system in high throughput massive MIMO configurations are derived. Furthermore, an efficient multipath orthogonal matching pursuit (EM-OMP)-based compressive sensing (CS) detector is developed for our proposed G-QSM system. Both our analytical and simulation results demonstrated that the proposed scheme is capable of providing considerable performance gains over the existing schemes in massive MIMO configurations.

Dual-function radar-communications (DFRC) systems implement radar and communication functionalities on a single platform. Jointly designing these subsystems can lead to substantial gains in performance as well as size, cost, and power consumption. In this paper, we propose a DFRC system, which utilizes generalized spatial modulation (GSM) to realize coexisting radar and communications waveforms. Our proposed GSM-based scheme, referred to as spatial modulation based communication-radar (SpaCoR) system, allocates antenna elements among the subsystems based on the transmitted message, thus achieving increased communication rates by embedding additional data bits in the antenna selection. We formulate the resulting signal models, and present a dedicated radar processing scheme. To evaluate the radar performance, we characterize the statistical properties of the transmit beam pattern. Then, we present a hardware prototype of the proposed DFRC system, demonstrating the feasibility of the scheme. Our results show that the proposed GSM system achieves improved communication performance compared to techniques utilizing fixed allocations operating at the same data rate. For the radar subsystem, our experiments show that the spatial agility induced by the GSM transmission improves the angular resolution and reduces the sidelobe level in the transmit beam pattern compared to using fixed antenna allocations.

In this paper, a physical-layer network coding (PNC) method is offered for a two-way relay network with spatial modulation (SM) for source node and relay node. For this purpose, we consider a two-way relay network consists of a single relay node and two source nodes both equipped with multiple antennas. It includes two source nods for transferring the data through SM and also, the relay node for decrypting coded packet network (through the XOR) of two packets received from the source node. In the proposed method, the signal detection approach with maximum-likelihood for the PNC with SM modulation is used for relay nodes. The simulation results show that the bit error rate (BER) in the relay node of the proposed method is significantly improved compared to the conventional method PNC; while the data rate is based on the same BER. It is worth mentioning that the performance of the proposed method, when the number of antenna nodes rises, is significant. And it leads to increase in the data rate which indicates that the proposed method will be much convenient for the next generation of wireless communication systems, especially the fifth generation. It should also be said that the suggested SM-based PNC method, does not need channel state information at transmitter. So it can be easily implemented in practice.

In this paper, we design an implementation of a kind of reduced-complexity maximum likelihood (ML) detector for spatial modulation (SM) deployed in a multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) system. Based on National Instruments Universal Software Radio Peripheral (NI USRP) platform, two USRP Reconfigurable Input / Output (USRP-RIO) devices are used as the transmitter and the receiver. Error performance comparisons between the reduced-complexity ML detector and conventional ML detector are made in an indoor environment, as well as the comparison between SM scheme and space-frequency block code (SFBC) scheme. 6 different pictures are exploited as transmitted data, and are reconstructed in the receiver side, so the performance of each scheme is taken on the reconstructed pictures. Both of the calculated bit error ratio (BER) and the reconstruction result of each transmitted pictures, validate the highly consistent error performance of HL_ML detector and conventional ML detector, as well as the error performance superiority of SM over SFBC.

In this paper, we study transmit codebook designs for spatial modulation with analog phase shifters. The proposed spatial modulation with analog phase shifters can send more spatial symbols than conventional spatial modulation, while reserving the low complexity of single RF-chain MIMO structure. The main idea is to transmit N <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">t</sub> different phase-shifted copies of a digitally modulated signal through N <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">t</sub> transmit antennas. In each time slot, the transmitted information bits are divided into two groups. The first group of the bits is mapped to the digitally modulated signal symbol. The second group of the bits is mapped to the spatial symbol, which determines the phase shift of each antenna. The transmit signal designs are carried out in open loop and closed loop scenarios, respectively. In open loop scenario, the transmit codebook is designed in two steps, i.e., generate the optimal spatial codebook according to Grassmannian line packing criterion, and find the optimal tradeoff between the cardinality of spatial codebook and the modulation order of signal symbol. In the closed loop scenario, the transmit codebook is designed according to the structure of Huffman tree. Extensive simulation results are given to validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in open loop scenario and close loop scenario, respectively.