On the use of spatial modulation in aeronautical communications

In this work, we apply Spatial Modulation (SM) to in the so-called spectrally shaped SC-OFDM (SS SC-OFDM) at the transmitter. The idea behind SS SC-OFDM lies in applying a frequency window between the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and the Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (IFFT) in order to lower the side-lobes of the resulting time domain generated waveform. Thus, we can avoid the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) problem encountered in multicarrier systems. At the receiver, a reduced-rank (rr) Least Square (LS) channel estimation and a combining Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) equalization are used to retrieve the transmitted block of information bits, considering two flight scenarios for different environments.