Mutual Information Analysis on Spatial Modulation Multiple Antenna System

Spatial modulation (SM) is a recently proposed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) architecture that exploits the space domain for information transmission. In this paper, SM systems with continuous amplitude-phase modulation (APM) and the corresponding maximum likelihood (ML) active transmit antenna detector are considered. We introduced a method to compute the theoretical transition probability matrix and the mutual information of the ML antenna detector. For SM multiple-input single-output (MISO) system, we derive the error probability and the mutual information of the antenna detector in closed-form. For multiple receive antenna SM system, the union bound of error probability and the lower bound of antenna detection mutual information are proposed. The analytical results are verified by numerical simulation over Rayleigh fading channels. We investigate systems with different number of antennas and APM symbol input distributions to evaluate the performance of SM. The joint APM and antenna detection mutual information of SM systems is compared to the capacity of vertical Bell Labs layered space-time (V-BLAST) spatial multiplexing MIMO scheme. Our research gives achievable transmission rates of SM-MISO/MIMO systems and can be a guideline for suitable application scenarios.