A Survey on Spatial Modulation OFDM: Optimal Detection and Performance Analysis

Spatial modulation is a novel modulation scheme that aims to acquire a trade-off between the two adverse purposes in wireless communications, namely the improvements of data rate and data reliability, by adjusting the operational transmit antenna index in the emitted bits. To fight against inter-symbol interference (ISI) present in frequency selective channels, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) as become a extensively accepted and used mechanism. We investigate in this work the performance of SM-OFDM modulation over frequency selective MIMO channel using quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) scheme. At the receiver side, a group of detectors is proposed to recover the active transmit antenna index (Tx-antenna) and the emitted data sequence. In this paper, a new SM-OFDM-based scheme is proposed, which adds another element of information in the transmitted SM-data block consisting of a chosen constellation among the available rotated set. To attain this, an additional index is used to select the specific constellation. At the receiver, a set of detectors is proposed to jointly estimate the transmitted symbol, as well as the used constellation and the active transmit antenna indices. The comparison of the performance of this new scheme against the conventional SM-OFDM shows an increased spectral efficiency at the price of a slight degradation in bit error rate. The proposed scheme permits a trade-off between the quality of the communication and the achieved spectral efficiency. Some concluding remarks are drawn over simulation results.