Downlink macro-diversity precoding-aided spatial modulation

Abstract: In this paper, a downlink macro-diversity precodingaided spatial modulation (MD-PSM) scheme is proposed, in which two base stations (BSs) communicate simultaneously with a single mobile station (MS). As such, the proposed scheme achieved twice the spectral efficiency of the conventional PSM scheme. To render the demodulation possible, the two signal constellation sets used at the two BSs should be disjoint. Also, since the two BSs use the same spatial dimension, i.e., indices of receive antennas, the Minkowski sum of the two constellation sets should include unrepeated symbols. This is achieved through rotating the constellation set used by the second BS, where the error rate is also minimized. After obtaining the optimal rotation angles for several scenarios, a reduced complexity maximum-likelihood receiver is introduced. For an equal number of transmit and receive antennas of 4 and at a target BER of 10^{-4}, the simulation results show that the proposed MD-PSM scheme outperforms the conventional PSM by about 17.3 dB and 12.4 dB, while achieving the same and double the spectral efficiency, respectively. Also, due to the distributed nature of MDPSM, it is shown that the diversity order of the novel MD-PSM scheme is twice that of the conventional PSM.