Towards the performance and energy efficiency comparison of spatial modulation with conventional single-antenna transmission over generalized fading channels

In this paper, we present a performance and energy efficiency comparison of the recently devised single RF Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) concept of Spatial Modulation (SM) with the conventional single-antenna transmission method with receive Maximum Ratio Combining (MRC), which we denote as single-antenna/MRC, for different types of fading channels. In particular, the fading channels that are examined are: i) Rayleigh, ii) Nakagami-m, and iii) Weibull. Results that are based on Monte Carlo simulations show two main findings: i) the severity of fading has a big impact on the relative signal-to-noise (SNR) difference and energy efficiency gain between these two schemes for a target average bit error probability (ABEP); ii) the more severe the fading is, the more suitable SM tends to be with respect to the single antenna/MRC, according to the energy per bit required to achieve a particular low target ABEP.