Low Complexity Optimal and Suboptimal Detection at Spatial Modulation MIMO Receivers

This paper develops three low-complexity detection schemes for the spatial modulation (SM) Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) systems. We first propose a reduced complexity maximum likelihood (RC-ML) detection scheme. For the practical values of the modulation index, the proposed RC-ML method is simpler than the existing hard-limiting-based ML schemes. The two other proposals are based on a suboptimal Maximum Ratio Combining (MRC) detection method. We present a new analysis of the MRC detector in the uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channel and identify the system operational scenarios for which the MRC performance is nearly identical to the ML performance. Our proposals — a hybrid MRC-ML method and an MRC scheme with rank reduction — are inspired by this analysis. The analytical and simulation results show that the proposed MRC-based schemes can attain a near-optimal performance while reducing the complexity of the ML-based SM receiver.