Adaptive Spatial Modulation for Spectrum Sharing Systems With Limited Feedback

We have recently introduced adaptive spatial modulation (ASM) for multiple antenna systems, with the aim of improving the energy efficiency through spatial modulation (SM) and improving the average spectral efficiency (ASE) through adaptive modulation (AM). In this paper, we extend ASM to cognitive radio (CR) systems in an effort to improve the secondary system´s performance in terms of energy efficiency and ASE. To this end, we propose two ASM schemes, one referred to as fixed power scheme (FPS) and the other as adaptive power scheme (APS). In both schemes, the secondary transmitter (ST) has limited knowledge of the channel state information (CSI) of the interference link. The difference between the two schemes, however, lies in the way the limited CSI is used to adapt the transmit power and/or modulation. As a benchmark, we also consider the scenario where the ST has perfect knowledge of the CSI of the interference link. For all cases, we analyze the performance in terms of ASE, average delay, and bit error rate (BER). We show that the proposed schemes offer tradeoffs in terms of the previously mentioned performance metrics, thus offering different options for applying ASM to CR systems. We also provide several simulation examples through which we corroborate the analytical results.