New Trellis Code Design for Spatial Modulation

Abstract

Spatial modulation (SM) in which multiple antennas are used to convey information besides the conventional M-ary signal constellations is a new multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission technique which has recently been proposed as an alternative to V-BLAST (vertical Bell Labs layered space-time). In this paper a novel MIMO transmission scheme called spatial modulation with trellis coding (SM-TC) is proposed. Similar to the conventional trellis coded modulation (TCM) in this scheme a trellis encoder and an SM mapper are jointly designed to take advantage of the benefits of both. A soft decision Viterbi decoder which is fed with the soft information supplied by the optimal SM decoder is used at the receiver. A pairwise error probability (PEP) upper bound is derived for the SM-TC scheme in uncorrelated quasi-static Rayleigh fading channels. From the PEP upper bound code design criteria are given and then used to obtain new 4- 8- and 16-state SM-TC schemes using quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) and 8-ary phase-shift keying (8-PSK) modulations for 2 3 and 4 bits/s/Hz spectral efficiencies. It is shown via computer simulations and also supported by a theoretical error performance analysis that the proposed SM-TC schemes achieve significantly better error performance than the classical space-time trellis codes and coded V-BLAST systems at the same spectral efficiency yet with reduced decoding complexity.