A Low-Complexity Near-ML Differential Spatial Modulation Detector

Differential spatial modulation (DSM) is a newly-emerging differential scheme tailored to the spatial modulation technique, which selects only one among a group of antennas for transmission at any time instant. DSM, however, gives rise to prohibitive search complexity when the number of transmit antennas is large. In this letter, a low-complexity suboptimal detector is proposed for DSM. It is designed based on the maximum-likelihood criterion but takes more candidates for the antenna activation orders into account. The detection is performed in two steps: the first step is to confine the number of candidates for the modulated symbols to a small portion by exploiting the symmetry of the signal constellation; the second step is to select the most likely modulated symbols from the output of the first step according to the determined antenna activation order via a Viterbi-like algorithm. Analyses and simulations show that the proposed detector achieves near-optimal performance yet largely reduces the search complexity.