Generalised spatial modulation

In this paper, a generalised technique for spatial modulation (SM) is presented. Generalised spatial modulation (GSM) overcomes in a novel fashion the constraint in SM that the number of transmit antennas has to be a power of two. In GSM, a block of information bits is mapped to a constellation symbol and a spatial symbol. The spatial symbol is a combination of transmit antennas activated at each instance. The actual combination of active transmit antennas depends on the random incoming data stream. This is unlike SM where only a single transmit antenna is activated at each instance. GSM increases the overall spectral efficiency by base-two logarithm of the number of antenna combinations. This reduces the number of transmit antennas needed for the same spectral efficiency. The performance of GSM is analysed in this paper, and an upper bound on the bit-error-ratio (BER) performance is derived. In addition, an algorithm to optimise the antenna combination selection is proposed. Finally, the performance of GSM is validated through Monte Carlo simulations. The results are compared with traditional SM. It is shown that for the same spectral efficiency GSM performs nearly the same as SM, but with a significant reduction in the number of transmit antennas.