Multi-Configuration Selection Mechanisms and Analog Precoding for Signature Spatial Modulation

Spatia1 modulation (SM) has attracted enormous research attention due to its notable merits in terms of enabling higher spectral- and energy-efficiencies relative to the conventional MIMO technique. To provide higher system performance for SM, linear precoder is designed to shape the APM constellations observed at the receiver. However, numerical results reveal that: (1) The performance of precoding based approaches degrades dramatically for higher-level QAM constellations, which implicitly affect the spectral-efficiency improvement of SM. (2) The complexity of precoder optimization increases greatly with the system dimensions and the APM constellation dimensions, which indeed is cost inefficient. In this context, this paper introduces the signature spatial modulation (SSM) technique that inherits the properties of both the SM and the analog shift weighting techniques. To guarantee superior trade-offs among spectral-and cost-efficiencies, and bit error rate (BER) performance for SSM, we first develop efficient multi-configuration selection mechanisms by exploiting the spatial degree of freedoms (DoFs), as well as by leveraging the benefits of SM. To provide a global optimum solution against the constant-modulus constrained analog precoding problem, we next relax the precoding problem into unconstrained alternating minimization subproblems, followed by proposing Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (BFGS) aided alternating minimization algorithm to solve those subproblems. It should be noted that our proposed mechanism can realize an L-fold reduction in terms of the number of transmit antennas. In particular, theoretical results reveal that our proposal can reduce the complexities brought by the configuration selection operation up to 50% when considering L-QAM with L=4.