A spatial modulation scheme with full diversity for four transmit antennas

In this paper, we propose a Spatial Modulation (SM) with full diversity for 4 transmit antennas, called DS-SM, by designing SC codewords and incorporating them with a Diagonal Space Time Block Code. Similar to the conventional SM scheme, the proposed scheme only activates an antenna element at a time for signal transmission. However, it is different from the conventional SM in that it is able to achieve full diversity. In order to attain low detection complexity, an ML detector based on sphere decoding is presented. Computer simulation shows that the proposed DS-SM scheme outperforms some existing STBC-SM techniques in terms of both bit error rate (BER) performance and effective throughput.