What Roles Can Spatial Modulation and Space Shift Keying Play in LEO Satellite-Assisted Communications?

TL;DR

This paper investigates the use of spatial modulation and space shift keying in LEO satellite MIMO systems to improve spectral efficiency and error performance, providing analytical and simulation-based insights for future 6G applications.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive analysis of SM and SSK schemes in LEO satellite communications, highlighting their advantages, trade-offs, and potential for 6G integration.

Findings

SM and SSK improve spectral efficiency and BER performance.

Analytical and Monte Carlo simulations validate the schemes' effectiveness.

Trade-offs include complexity and robustness under imperfect CSI.

Abstract

In recent years, the rapid evolution of satellite communications play a pivotal role in addressing the ever-increasing demand for global connectivity, among which the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites attract a great amount of attention due to their low latency and high data throughput capabilities. Based on this, we explore spatial modulation (SM) and space shift keying (SSK) designs as pivotal techniques to enhance spectral efficiency (SE) and bit-error rate (BER) performance in the LEO satellite-assisted multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The various performance analysis of these designs are presented in this paper, revealing insightful findings and conclusions through analytical methods and Monte Carlo simulations with perfect and imperfect channel state information (CSI) estimation. The results provide a comprehensive analysis of the merits and trade-offs associated with the investigated schemes, particularly in terms of BER, computational complexity, and SE. This analysis underscores the potential of both schemes as viable candidates for future 6G LEO satellite-assisted wireless communication systems.