A Comparative Performance Analysis for Spatial Modulation (SM) and Quadrature-Amplitude Modulation (QAM) Techniques

Abstract

Spatial modulation is a novel technique for the transmission of signals through a system of multiple antennas known as Multiple Input-Multiple Output (MIMO), where the index of the transmit antenna is used as an additional source of information to improve the overall spectral efficiency. In this paper, we use space shift keying (SSK), which is the simplest form of spatial modulation, to present a comparative performance analysis against the existing and well-known method of quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). In order to carry out this analysis, this paper compares the bit error rate (BER) performance between SSK and QAM transmission schemes and computes their detection complexity at the receiver in terms of floating point operations (flops). Simulations results show that SSK achieves BER performance gains of up to 7 dB compared to QAM. In terms of detection complexity, SSK has a reduction of up to 33 % for the analyzed cases.