Adaptive Signal Vector Based Detection for Spatial Modulation

In this letter, we propose a new adaptive signal vector based detection (ASVD) for spatial modulation (SM) systems. The proposed detector first determines a collection of candidate transmit antennas dynamically by a carefully designed criterion and then performs data detection using the low complexity hard-limiting technique. As compared to the existing hard-limiting maximum likelihood (HL-ML) detector that requires searching over all transmit antennas, the proposed ASVD shrinks the search space and thus has lower computational complexity. It is seen that, under the moderate and high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) condition, the proposed ASVD can outperform existing SVD and list SVD competitors and very closely approach the performance of HL-ML with very few candidate antennas.