Pseudo-random phase precoded spatial modulation and precoder index modulation

Spatial modulation (SM) is a transmission scheme that uses multiple transmit antennas but only one transmit RF chain. At each time instant, only one among the transmit antennas will be active and the others remain silent. The index of the active transmit antenna will also convey information bits in addition to the information bits conveyed through modulation symbols. Pseudo-random phase precoding (PRPP) is a technique that can achieve high diversity orders even in single antenna systems without the need for channel state information at the transmitter and transmit power control. In this paper, we exploit the advantages of both SM and PRPP simultaneously. We propose a pseudo-random phase precoded SM (PRPP-SM) scheme, where both the modulation bits and the antenna index bits are precoded by pseudo-random phases. The proposed PRPP-SM system gives significant performance gains over SM system without PRPP and PRPP system without SM. Since maximum likelihood (ML) detection becomes exponentially complex in large dimensions, we propose a low complexity local search based detection (LSD) algorithm suited for PRPP-SM systems with large precoder sizes. Our simulation results show that with 4 transmit antennas, 1 receive antenna, 5 × 20 pseudo-random phase precoder matrix and BPSK modulation, the performance of PRPP-SM using ML detection is better than SM without PRPP with ML detection by about 9 dB at 10² BER. This performance advantage gets even better for large precoding sizes. We also propose a precoder index modulation (PIM) scheme, which conveys additional information bits through the choice of a precoding matrix among a set of pre-determined PRPP matrices. Finally, combining the PIM and PRPP-SM schemes, we propose a PIM-SM scheme which conveys bits through both antenna index as well as precoder index.