Performance of Spatial Modulation for Multiple-Antenna Wireless Systems Over Uncorrelated Rayligh Flat Fading Channel

The trend towards achieving higher data rates in wireless communications is endless and requires sophisticated transmission mechanisms that are capable to deliver higher spectral efficiency. Multiple input Multiple output (MEMO) wireless communications were realized to have an inevitability in accelerating evolution of higher data rates. However, although MIMO technique achieves better diversity and antenna gain, it faces the problem of inter channel interference (ICI) due to the multiple number of radio frequency (RF) chains. Another major disadvantage of this mechanism is to use maximum likelihood (ML) detector for attaining better performance of bit error rate; however, it generates a significant decoding complexity which exponentially increases with increasing number of transmit antennas. For these reasons the attention has been shifted to introduce a new transmission mechanism that can overcome problems faced in conventional MEMO. Spatial modulation (SM) was the best candidate to resolve that issues and increase the spectral efficiency over multipath fading channel. In SM only a single antenna will be active for the period of data transmission, means only one RF chain is deployed. This entirely removes (ICI) and decreases decoding complexity. The contribution of this paper is to introduce the concepts of SM and evaluate its bit error rate (BER) performance over uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channel with the use of ML decoding algorithm.