Generalized Spatial Modulation in Large-Scale Multiuser MIMO Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores generalized spatial modulation (GSM) for large-scale multiuser MIMO uplink, providing analytical error bounds, low-complexity detection algorithms, and demonstrating significant spectral efficiency and power gains over traditional MIMO schemes.

Contribution

It introduces an ABEP analysis for multiuser GSM-MIMO, develops message passing detection and channel estimation algorithms, and shows GSM-MIMO's advantages over SM-MIMO and conventional MIMO.

Findings

ABEP upper bounds are tight at moderate to high SNR.

Proposed algorithms scale well and achieve near-optimal performance.

GSM-MIMO outperforms SM-MIMO and conventional MIMO by 2-9 dB at BER of 10^{-3}.

Abstract

Generalized spatial modulation (GSM) uses $n_t$ transmit antenna elements but fewer transmit radio frequency (RF) chains, $n_{rf}$. Spatial modulation (SM) and spatial multiplexing are special cases of GSM with $n_{rf}=1$ and $n_{rf}=n_t$, respectively. In GSM, in addition to conveying information bits through $n_{rf}$ conventional modulation symbols (for example, QAM), the indices of the $n_{rf}$ active transmit antennas also convey information bits. In this paper, we investigate {\em GSM for large-scale multiuser MIMO communications on the uplink}. Our contributions in this paper include: ($i$) an average bit error probability (ABEP) analysis for maximum-likelihood detection in multiuser GSM-MIMO on the uplink, where we derive an upper bound on the ABEP, and ($ii$) low-complexity algorithms for GSM-MIMO signal detection and channel estimation at the base station receiver based on message passing. The analytical upper bounds on the ABEP are found to be tight at moderate to high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). The proposed receiver algorithms are found to scale very well in complexity while achieving near-optimal performance in large dimensions. Simulation results show that, for the same spectral efficiency, multiuser GSM-MIMO can outperform multiuser SM-MIMO as well as conventional multiuser MIMO, by about 2 to 9 dB at a bit error rate of $10^{-3}$. Such SNR gains in GSM-MIMO compared to SM-MIMO and conventional MIMO can be attributed to the fact that, because of a larger number of spatial index bits, GSM-MIMO can use a lower-order QAM alphabet which is more power efficient.