Multiple access spatial modulation

In this study, we seek to characterise the behaviour of Spatial modulation (SM) in the multiple access scenario. By only activating a single transmit antenna for any transmission, SM entirely avoids inter-channel interference, requires no synchronisation between the transmit antennas and a single radio frequency chain at the transmitter. Most contributions thus far have only addressed aspects of SM for a point-to-point communication system. We propose a maximum-likelihood (ML) detector which can successfully decode incoming data from multiple simultaneous transmissions and does not suffer from the near-far problem. We analyse the performance of the interference-unaware and interference-aware detectors. We look at the behaviour of SM as the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio goes to infinity and compare it to the complexity and cost equivalent single-input-multiple-output (SIMO) system. Two systems are considered to be equivalent in terms of complexity if their respective detection algorithms are of the same order in O ( · ) notation. Simulation results show that the interference-aware SM detector performs better than the complexity equivalent multi-user ML-SIMO detector by at least 3 dB at an average bit-error-ratio of 10 −3 .