Detect-and-Forward Relaying Aided Cooperative Spatial Modulation for Wireless Networks

A novel detect-and-forward (DeF) relaying aided cooperative SM scheme is proposed, which is capable of striking a flexible tradeoff in terms of the achievable bit error ratio (BER), complexity and unequal error protection (UEP). More specifically, SM is invoked at the source node (SN) and the information bit stream is divided into two different sets: the antenna index-bits (AI-bits) as well as the amplitude and phase modulation-bits (APM-bits). By exploiting the different importance of the AI-bits and the APM-bits in SM detection, we propose three low-complexity, yet powerful relay protocols, namely the partial, the hybrid and the hierarchical modulation (HM) based DeF relaying schemes. These schemes determine the most appropriate number of bits to be re-modulated by carefully considering their potential benefits and then assigning a specific modulation scheme for relaying the message. As a further benefit, the employment of multiple radio frequency (RF) chains and the requirement of tight inter-relay synchronization (IRS) can be avoided. Moreover, by exploiting the benefits of our low-complexity relaying protocols and our inter-element interference (IEI) model, a low-complexity maximum-likelihood (ML) detector is proposed for jointly detecting the signal received both via the source-destination (SD) and relay-destination (RD) links. Additionally, an upper bound of the BER is derived for our DeF-SM scheme. Our numerical results show that the bound is asymptotically tight in the high-SNR region and the proposed schemes provide beneficial system performance improvements compared to the conventional MIMO schemes in an identical cooperative scenario.